Apologies for the FOSSwire radio silence recently. I've been really really busy with university stuff. My Christmas break starts next week, so with any luck FOSSwire should get some more content over the festive period. Thanks for bearing with us!
The Amarok team have officially unveiled the 2.0 release of the popular open source music and media player application.
The world of digital music management has changed a great deal since the birth of Amarok four and a half years ago. Amarok 1 established a reputation for innovation, but maintaining development with the old framework became more difficult as Amarok grew, often in directions we never imagined.
Some of the things this new release brings to the table include:
- New user interface
- Integration with many online music services (Last.fm, Magnatune and others)
- New scripting API
Crucially, Amarok 2.0 is built against KDE 4, rather than KDE 3, making it an ideal music player for KDE 4-based desktops as it now runs natively.
There are also Beta versions of this 2.0 release available for other platforms as well - with Windows and Mac OS X versions available. The use of the Qt library underneath KDE means that the versions for these other systems integrate well (for example, Amarok 2.0 uses global menu bar when run under Mac OS X - so it 'feels like' any other Mac app).
I haven't yet had a chance to play with the new release, but you can read further release notes and download the 2.0 version from the Amarok site.
MPlayer is one of the many available media playback systems for Linux and Unix-like operating systems and is particularly useful to many people thanks to its support of proprietary and non-standard video formats.
While the use of these formats will undoubtedly be controversial, the pragmatic Linux user will often still want to be able to enjoy media in these other formats, which makes MPlayer a good solution.
Inside your web browser, however, MPlayer's default plugin interface does not feel very integrated visually with the rest of the system.
Gecko-MediaPlayer is a custom browser plugin which uses MPlayer and its GNOME bindings to provide a better user interface for playing audio and video inside your browser. Any media playable by MPlayer that you come across online can be played back through the plugin, just like the mplayerplug-in package, but with a vastly improved user interface that feels integrated with the GNOME desktop.
Installing the Gecko-MediaPlayer plugin is generally as simple as installing the gecko-mediaplayer package. You may want to remove the mplayerplug-in package first if it is installed, to avoid conflicts between the two browser plugins.
Once you've installed and restarted your browser, any media that MPlayer can handle will show up in the new interface.
If you're a GNOME user that also chooses MPlayer as their media solution for the web, installing this package is a quick and easy way to improve your online viewing experience, through a better integrated UI.
Linux music player application Banshee has just been updated to version 1.0.
The new version features significant performance improvements, plus a host of brand new features, including Video, a new Play Queue feature, Shuffle and improved support for third-party media devices and Last.fm.
"Import, organize, and discover new music with Banshee through its simple
and powerful interface and wide array of innovative features. Create
your own radio stations or listen to a friends' through Last.fm integration;
experience automatic cover art fetching as you listen; and easily browse,
search, and control your media collection."
Source
Depending on your distribution, it might be a while before the 1.0 release hits your software repositories and appears for update. The download page, however, includes packages for Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Foresight, Fedora and Debian and of course you can grab the source code and compile it yourself too.
