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Amarok is a powerful music player for Linux and Unix, MacOS X and Windows with an intuitive interface. It makes playing the music you love and discovering new music easier than ever before - and it looks good doing it!

This is also the release that sees the return of the project founder, Mark Kretschmann, and together our reunited team has created the best Amarok version yet.

These are some of the highlights:

* A fancy audio analyzer visualization applet
* Smooth fade-out when pausing music
* Many UI improvements and visual tweaks including better support for alternate color themes
* Significantly enhanced MusicBrainz tagger
* Power management awareness with a pair of new configuration options
* Performance optimizations and responsiveness tuning all over Amarok

We haven't been lazy even before this, as this release also comes with an impressive amount of other bug fixes: a total of over 470 bugs were closed since the 2.6 release, of which exactly 100 are direct bug fixes (with a commit link). Over 15 feature requests were granted directly or indirectly as well.

We are also proud to ship a completely updated handbook, with updated screenshots and help pages for the new features. In this context our thanks goes to the Google Code-In students who helped in updating the handbook. Several Code-In students also helped to test Amarok extensively, both with the 2.7 beta1 release and the development version. The students also helped in moving two old wiki instances to a new server, verifying articles were currently relevant with working links. In total, 10 students worked on a total of 47 tasks for Amarok: great work indeed!