Today the Amarok project releases Narwhal, the release candidate of the upcoming Amarok 2.0.

The changes since Beta 3 focus mostly on fixing bugs, as we are in a fairly hard feature-freeze to give us time to polish the final product. However, this didn’t stop us from adding a few nice new things.

And remember, the new Amarok 2.0 RC 1 works on Windows and MacOS too.

The Amarok team has proudly announced a few hours ago the second beta release of the upcoming Amarok 2.0 music player. The much-anticipated release brings lots of improvements, new features and numerous bug fixes.

The most important changes in Amarok 2.0 Beta 2 are:

· Incremental scanning support;

I used this player for about three years and I love it more and more, with each new release. Statistics show around 60% of the Linux users prefer Amarok over any other audio player. 60%! That's huge. This article lists 7 reasons for which I think this is the most loved audio player. I preferred to leave out the more technical ones, and just concentrate on the highlights.

Review of the 10 most used audio players: Amarok, Rhythmbox, Audacious, Banshee, Exaile, Beep Media Player, JuK, Quod Libet, Listen, Songbird.

Thanks to KDE 4 Plasma magic the video is nicely integrated into the context view of the user interface of Amarok 2. This feature is especially handy for watching YouTube videos, and they're working on integrating it directly with their SeeqPod service, allowing to find and play videos from the net in the blink of an eye.

A year and a half ago, the excellent Linux music player Amarok added extensive support for Magnatune. The programmer, Nikolaj Hald Nielsen, did this on his own initiative, simply because he thought it'd be a neat thing for his favorite music player to have, and because he liked Magnatune's business philosophy.

Amarok is a popular audio player under Linux. It can manage external storage devices, transfer music to your iPod, display lyrics, and play various formats. Although Amarok supports scripts to extend its functionality, not many users know about the powerful features that these simple plugins can provide.