Amarok 3.2 beta available

[Tuomas Nurmi]

Hi everyone,

Amarok 3.2 beta (3.1.81) has been tagged and is available at
https://download.kde.org/unstable/amarok/3.1.81/amarok-3.1.81.tar.xz.mirrorlist

As is observable from the ChangeLog,
https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/amarok/-/blob/b54bbe5afd2857252604d0fbb83bb6df44167d88/ChangeLog
the most interesting change is probably the bumped KDE Framework dependency to 5.108, which
enables the same codebase to be built on both Qt5 and Qt6. Qt5/KF5 is still the recommended,
tested configuration, for now.

Qt6 version is probably usable, but as far as I know, has not been tested in real usage that
much. There are also some known issues with Qt6 based build, namely albums context applet
not working (porting it from QtControls 1 to 2 will require Qt5-incompatible changes), and
last.fm and gpodder not being available due to lack of Qt6 based libraries for them.

Additionally, there are e.g. some collection filtering and Ampache related features and fixes
included. Multiple long-standing crash bug reports have been closed lately, and although I'm
not able to pinpoint the exact fixes for all of them, recent improvements in collection query
threading code seems to have made everything a bit more stable.

The 3.2.0 release will follow probably later in December, with some 3.2.x bugfix releases in 2025.

After 3.2 series, it is time to drop Qt5/KF5 and go all-in on Qt6/KF6. That'll probably be called
Amarok 4. I've collected a bunch of TODOs as invent.kde.org issues, they can be found at
https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/amarok/-/issues
However, no concrete plans on how to start working on those, yet.

Cheers
Tuomas