Amarok 3.3 released [LWN.net]

Version 3.3 of the Amarok music player has been released. This is the first release of Amarok based on KDE Frameworks 6 and Qt 6. Amarok 3.3 also includes a major rework of its audio engine to use GStreamer for audio playback.

The reworked audio engine provides unified feature set for all users and should provide a solid and future-proof sonic experience for years to come. Notable improvements have also landed to the database system: improved character set support helps with e.g. emojis in podcast descriptions and other very exotic symbols, date handling has been improved ('year 2038 problem'), and various other potential and actual database-related issues have been fixed.

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Legendary

Posted Jul 10, 2025 0:36 UTC (Thu) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link] (7 responses)

Amarok has always been a good friend for quite a long time. It did fade out for a while but that was merely a sabbatical!

Legendary

Posted Jul 10, 2025 9:37 UTC (Thu) by ryanduve (subscriber, #127786) [Link] (6 responses)

I thought it had been rebranded as "Clementine" a long time ago. I just looked it up and realize Clementine is a fork, but Amarok is still maintained, off and on like you say. My memory is fuzzy but I think Clementine happened because Amarok had such a huge overhaul (for 2.0?) it felt like different software.

I wonder whether today's Amarok has returned to those roots or whether it's found stability/success in the new-but-not-so-new-anymore design.

Legendary

Posted Jul 10, 2025 10:47 UTC (Thu) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link]

And Clementine's pretty unmaintained, too. However, there's a fork of Clementine called Strawberry that works very well for me and is actually maintained.

Legendary

Posted Jul 10, 2025 14:03 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (4 responses)

As I remember it, Clementine is the old Amarok/KDE3 (or KDE2, KDE4, whatever ...). Anyways, Amarok got re-written for a new KDE/Qt, and a load of people who didn't like the rewrite carried on maintaining the old Amarok, which was renamed Clementine.

I'm very much one of the "I like Clementine" (or rather "I don't like change") people, so I still have it in my world set, but since my computer was rebuilt a while back, and sound wasn't included, I haven't used it. I tend to use my computer as an old-fashioned computer, not a modern entertainment centre, plus my wife doesn't like my taste in music ...

I guess I will have to investigate Strawberry ...

Cheers,
Wol

Legendary

Posted Jul 10, 2025 14:24 UTC (Thu) by ajt (guest, #29568) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes, it was forked and then the fork faded too, but the fork of the fork is okay. Curious to see what the updated original looks like - it's been a while since I've used it. Not sure if it will be sufficiently better than Strawberry to make it worth switching back.

Strawberry is pretty good if you want something to play music and not get in the way. There are some scripts that can convert a Clementine database into a Strawberry one, so you don't lose anything from the Clementine database.

Legendary

Posted Jul 10, 2025 17:23 UTC (Thu) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm a big fan of Strawberry—it does everything I wish a music player would do. The only complaint I have—and it's a very small one—is that if I play streams from Radio Paradise they do not "scrobble" to Last.fm correctly. They show up while playing but are not saved, which is probably a bug on the Last.fm side, but I'm not 100% certain of that.

Otherwise I find Strawberry to be perfect. I am looking forward to the 4.0 Amarok release, as I'm curious what kind of UI changes and features they might have now that they've completed the foundational work of moving to GStreamer and Qt6/KF6.

Legendary

Posted Jul 11, 2025 2:07 UTC (Fri) by DimeCadmium (subscriber, #157243) [Link]

Doesn't sound like a Last.fm bug, they have two different API calls, one for "now playing", one for "I played this"; your media player is meant to fire the latter when you've listened to most of the track. (The official client had a percentage selector, you could pick when it scrobbled, IIRC)

Legendary

Posted Jul 14, 2025 11:07 UTC (Mon) by pardo_bsso (guest, #111452) [Link]

To this day I still use the one from the Trinity project. Currently running inside a VM with the soul of my last workstation.

year 2038 problem

Posted Jul 12, 2025 11:21 UTC (Sat) by parametricpoly (subscriber, #143903) [Link]

Interesting to see a major end user application still suffered from year 2038 problems. Only 13 years till the world collapses. At least for those applications.

Radio-browser

Posted Jul 15, 2025 10:23 UTC (Tue) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link]

Looking for a player that interfaces with radio-browser. Strawberry does not seem to do it. I wonder if the new amarok does.