New amaroK coming

Okay so a new amaroK is coming: the release candidate of the first beta of 1.4 series of amaroK (how many ‘of’ are too many in a single phrase?) was released yesterday, and I strangely enough not blogged about that yet 🙂

The ebuild for such a version, that I named 1.4_pre1 as I couldn’t name it 1.4_beta1_pre1 (maybe using redhat-style 1.3.90_rc1 would have helped :P), is currently in my overlay, if you want to try it out.

Note: Ruby is now an hard dependency, as without it you won’t get lyrics support, and maybe other in future.

I also dropped the extra use flags for gstreamer’s plugins, I was finding that too confusing and the same was for at least a couple of users I heard from. If you want to use gstreamer, please at least learn how to install its plugins 🙂 This might also solve some of the problems I heard of like “gee I unmerged amaroK, ran depclean, and now ｢put some gstreamer app here｣ does not play ｢put some format here｣”.

I must say, if you just want amaroK to work smoothly, don’t try this yet. While markey solved my issue with module files appearing as “No track playing” in OSD (thanks markey 🙂 ), there are a few things I find a bit of regression (trying to get a hold of some dev on #amarok right now to tell them): the randomness is not so random anymore, and the “previous” button while playing a randomised playlist does not return to the last played track, instead it moves to the previous track in the sequential playlist open in amaroK in that moment.

Still, amaroK 1.4 is very well promising, and I’m sure that before the release those glitch will be fixed 🙂 Thanks for all the work, amaroK devs!