!!News Release!! Roktoberfest: The Amarok Project Fundraiser

[Greg Meyer]

October is Roktoberfest here at the Amarok Project and we are giving away an 
iPod Nano to celebrate. Roktoberfest is the time to review the events of the 
past 12 months and start planning and do the fundraising for the next 12 
months. 

Lots of cool stuff happened in the past year.
1.4 development started with a bang as about 5 major feature commits were made 
within minutes of the branch being opened. They were things like tag support 
for m4a/wma, a new user rating system to compliment the auto-scoring system, 
a new external collection scanner to dramatically reduce the crashiness of 
the main application and the ability to organize files so you could move 
their location in the filesystem without losing stats. The overall changelog 
for 1.4 was enormous, listing 64 feature additions. We jumped ahead to a 
premature release of version 2.0 on April 1, which was tremendous fun. 
Version 1.4 was released on May 17 with much fanfare right before the Amarok 
devs finally got together for a very productive set of development meetings 
in May. The summer was full of work brought about by stabilizing the branch 
and working on the Google Summer of Code project that added DAAP support. 
Lastly, we will wind down with the imminent release of 1.4.4.

Looking Ahead
We have declared a fundraiser to raise $5,000 to offset expenses in the coming 
year. There are server and bandwidth costs and there is some need for 
development hardware. We are also planning to have another meeting to work on 
Amarok 2, so there will be some travel costs. Amarok 2 will be based on 
QT4/KDE4 and will finally feature a Windows port, so for those of you that 
must use Windows, you will finally be able to have your rok and eat it too. 
PayPal is the easiest way to donate, just click the link in the left banner, 
but if you prefer to send a check, send a mail to amarokproject at gkmweb.com 
and we can provide a mailing address. As a thank you to our supporters, we 
will be entering everyone that donates $10 or more in a random drawing for a 
cool new 2GB iPod Nano.  Update: It has been asked and we agree that each $10 
gets you one chance, so if you donate $50, your name is entered 5 times.

We thank you for all the support you have given in the past, and we look 
forward to a very busy year.