Amarok Released 3.3 with Qt6/KF6 Port & GStreamer Backend

Amarok, the free open-source KDE music player, released new 3.3 version on Tuesday, named “Far Above the Clouds”.

Amarok is one of the oldest Linux music player started in 2003. It’s revived in last year with port to Qt5 and KF5. By releasing v3.3, Amarok is now ported to Qt6/KF6, while Qt5/KF5 support has been dropped.

Meaning now the music player is well integrated with most recent KDE Plamsa 6 desktop environment, while having faster rendering performance and less memory usage.

Besides that, the release now uses GStreamer instead of Phonon as backend for audio playback.

Other changes according to the changelog, include:

Default to not allow compiling without embedded database.
Handle volume better and avoid resets on track changes.
Apply default pre-gain when ReplayGain is active and use fallback value if no ReplayGain data is available for a track
Clear out some of the now-discontinued last.fm radio functionalities and partially replace by opening relevant last.fm pages
Partially re-enable cue file support.
Prevent concurrent scan result processings from taking place to avoid potential database issues.
Remove TagLib extras support (RealMedia and Audible files).
Update database character set to allow full utf-8 values.
Fix year 2038 problem for various dates saved in database.

For more, see the official release note.

How to Install Amarok 3.3

The source tarball of this music player application is available to download at KDE website via the link below:

Download Amarok

Besides building from source, Arch Linux has already made the app package into extra repository. While, most other Linux may install the Flatpak package, though it’s not updated at the moment of writing.

For Linux Mint and Fedora (with 3rd party repository enabled), simply search for and install the package from either Software Manager or GNOME Software.

While Debian, Ubuntu and their based systems may run the 2 commands below one by one to install the Flatpak:

First, open terminal/console (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run the command below to enable Flatpak support:
```
sudo apt install flatpak
```

Then, run the command below to install the music player as Flatpak:

flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.kde.amarok.flatpakref

Tips: if this is the first time you installing a Flatpak app package, then you may need a log out and back in to make app icon visible.

And, to check updates for the Flatpak package, use command:

flatpak update org.kde.amarok

Uninstall Amarok:

If you installed the music player through Flatpak package, then uninstall it via command:

flatpak uninstall --delete-data org.kde.amarok

Skip --delete-data flag if you want to keep the personal app data, e.g., preferences. And, run flatpak uninstall --unused to remove useless runtimes.