October is Roktoberfest here at the Amarok Project and we are giving away an iPod Nano to celebrate. Roktoberfest is the time to review the events of the past 12 months and start planning and do the fundraising for the next 12 months.

Lots of cool stuff happened in the past year.
1.4 development started with a bang as about 5 major feature commits were made within minutes of the branch being opened. They were things like tag support for m4a/wma, a new user rating system to compliment the auto-scoring system, a new external collection scanner to dramatically reduce the crashiness of the main application and the ability to organize files so you could move their location in the filesystem without losing stats. The overall changelog for 1.4 was enormous, listing 64 feature additions. We jumped ahead to a premature release of version 2.0 on April 1, which was tremendous fun. Version 1.4 was released on May 17 with much fanfare right before the Amarok devs finally got together for a very productive set of development meetings in May. The summer was full of work brought about by stabilizing the branch and working on the Google Summer of Code project that added DAAP support. Lastly, we will wind down with the imminent release of 1.4.4.

Looking Ahead
We have declared a fundraiser to raise $5,000 to offset expenses in the coming year. There are server and bandwidth costs and there is some need for development hardware. We are also planning to have another meeting to work on Amarok 2, so there will be some travel costs. Amarok 2 will be based on QT4/KDE4 and will finally feature a Windows port, so for those of you that must use Windows, you will finally be able to have your rok and eat it too. PayPal is the easiest way to donate, just click the link in the left banner, but if you prefer to send a check, send a mail to amarokproject@gkmweb.com and we can provide a mailing address. As a thank you to our supporters, we will be entering everyone that donates $10 US (or equivalent) or more in a random drawing for a cool new 2GB iPod Nano.  Update: It has been asked and we agree that each $10 US gets you one chance, so if you donate $50 US, your name is entered 5 times.

We thank you for all the support you have given in the past, and we look forward to a very busy year.

Does 10$ = 10 USD? I'm pretty sure it is, but it would be nice if you were a bit more specific, because the US does not own exclusive rights to the dollar sign.

Only because other countries stole the idea of the dollar sign

Yes, its safe to assume its $10.00 USD, it'd be specificed if not

Yes, we mean $10 US.  I have modifed the article to make this more clear.

Do you have a european account where one can transfer the donation? Not everyone has/likes PayPal, and by providing IBAN/BIC of the account, the transfer would be easy and without any additional costs in Europe.

I am trying to work that out.  If you haven't already, send me an e-mail (amarokproject@gkmweb.com) so I can reply to you once i get the details worked out in a few days.  Don't get impatient, we'll be doing this all month.