Beta for Amarok 3.3 available

Dear fans of music & open source music players,
in preparation of the upcoming Amarok 3.3 release, a beta release (3.2.81) has been prepared.

As shown in the ChangeLog, the changes are mostly technical: Qt5 support is removed, and Amarok 3.3 beta is compatible with Qt6/KF6 only. Additionally, a database scheme update (first such since 2012) fixes encoding and date related bugs.

Please note that due to the database update, downgrading from 3.3 beta is not directly possible, and returning to pre-3.3 versions requires the database (at ~/.local/share/amarok/mysqle/) to be manually backed up beforehand.

Aligning with current major KDE Frameworks version should simplify various direct and indirect software dependencies. However, phonon-vlc is the only supported backend on Qt6 Phonon, which Amarok 3.3 beta is still using for audio playback. This imposes some constraints e.g. on equalizer and analyzer functionalities. A more comprehensive overview of audio backend status is available on an invent.kde.org issue and a related work-in-progress merge request.

Additionally, there isn't official releases with Qt6 support of liblastfm available yet (needed for last.fm support). To enable the functionality, one needs to use library version built from e.g. sources at https://github.com/Mazhoon/liblastfm/tree/81e8f9dc16a0a18fe9a066d51c2071086326670b .

The Amarok 3.3 beta source tarball is available on download.kde.org and it has been signed with Tuomas Nurmi's GPG key. In addition to the source code, it is likely that some distributions will provide beta packages. The various nightly git builds provided by various splendid packagers should also provide a way of using the beta changes and participating in the testing.

Happy listening!