Amarok 3.0 "Castaway" released

The Amarok music player projecthas announcedthe release of version3.0, which is codenamed "Castaway". It is the firststable version using Qt5 and KDE Frameworks5, and the first stablerelease since the final Qt-4-based2.9.0 in 2018.

The road to 3.0 has not been a short one. Much of the Qt5/KF5 porting was done in 2015 already, but finishing and polishing everything up has been a slow, sometimes ongoing and sometimes stalled process ever since. 3.0 Alpha was released in February 2021 and has been since used by many people, as have been nightly builds of git master available for various distributions. Now in the past few months, an effort was made to get everything ready for a proper 3.0 release.

Common usecases should work quite well, and in addition to fixing KF5 portrelated regressions reported in pre-releases, 3.0 features many bugfixesand implemented features for longstanding issues, the oldest suchdocumented being from 2009. However, with more than 20 years of developmenthistory, it is likely that not every feature Amarok has been testedthoroughly in the new release, and specifically some Internet services thathave changed their API in recent years are not available, at least fornow. It might well be that getting them in better state wouldn't requirehuge effort, however, so if you know your way with Qt and KDE Frameworksand your favourite Internet music service does not work with Amarok 3.0,you are extremely welcome to join in and help!