Amarok 2.8 "Return To The Origin" released

[Mark Kretschmann]

It's the wonderful month of August and the Amarok Team is back with a
very strong release. Amarok 2.8 is titled "Return To The Origin" as we
are bringing back the polish that many users loved from the original
1.x series! The new Amarok is more fun to use, it's rock solid, and it
has exciting new features.

This is also the release that sees the return of the project founder,
Mark Kretschmann, and together our reunited team has created the best
Amarok version yet. These are some of the highlights:

* A fancy audio analyzer visualization applet
* Smooth fade-out when pausing music
* Many UI improvements and visual tweaks including better support for
alternate color themes
* Significantly enhanced MusicBrainz tagger
* Power management awareness with a pair of new configuration options
* Performance optimizations and responsiveness tuning all over Amarok

This release also features the first code contributions by our current
Google Summer of Code students: please welcome Anmol Ahuja, Konrad
Zemek and Tatjana Gornak. Our release manager Matěj Laitl takes part
in GSoC as well.

Many more candidates have applied for GSoC internships, sadly we were
not able to accept them all. But our thanks go to Vedant Argwala who
has contributed a lot of patches and continues to improve Amarok.

Outside the GSoC applications we also welcome new contributions by
Harsh Gupta, Martin Brodbeck and Alberto Villa. In addition, Nick
Adams has done a lot of work updating the Handbook. Thanks a lot,
guys!

-- 
Mark Kretschmann
Amarok Developer
Fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe
http://amarok.kde.org - http://fsfe.org