One of my favorite pieces of software, Amarok, just reached a milestone: 2.0, after two years of development. Amarok 2 started from scratch to utilize Qt4's and KDE4's new technologies, namely Plasma and Phonon, as well as increase the maintainability of the code.
The restoration of all the features from Amarok 1.4 is incomplete, but many will come back soon. New features include a completely redesigned UI; new scripting interface with QTScript, an extension of EMCAScript (others being JavaScript and ActionScript); new Internet music service framework; biased dynamic playlists; and fuzzy biased dynamic playlists. Awesome features still there from 1.4 include automatic lyrics fetching, in-player viewing of Wikipedia articles on the music playing, and statistics.
I think the new UI is a bit crowded. Reading context information about the music playing and making a playlist is not done at the same time, but the UI shows them both. This eats quite a bit of horizontal screen space for both. I like the proposition made by this mockup (KDE-Look page).
I have been compiling from SVN (although I think they are switching to Git soonish) frequently for several months and reporting bugs for Amarok 2.0. I am continuing to help out development beyond 2.0. I have an idea for a script, but I am having trouble understanding the documentation for the Qt bindings for QTScript (or the bindings are incomplete, I am not sure).
