Here is another alpha release: 2.5.0-alpha4. It has numerous improvements and bug fixes comparing to the previous unstable version released one and a half year ago. As you can see from the changelog most changes were made by contributors, not me. You can see there most of the patches posted/mentioned on the forum. There is the play queue, lyrics displaying, the equalizer and more.

There are also some fixes in this release that are not present in the stable version, I hope to find time to merge them soon.

Changes:

• Tags cache using BerkeleyDB for better perfomance, reliability and smaller memory usage.
• Play queue. (Martin Milata)
• Display lyrics saved in files together with music. Press L to try it. (Géraud Le Falher)
• Parametric equalizer and mono-mixing, see README_equalizer. (Hendrik Iben)
• Keys to mark fragment of a file while it's playing using (default ' and "). The positions in seconds can be passed as arguments via ExecCommandX as %S and %E. (John Fitzgerald )
• Add check for newer faad2-library (AAC). (Hendrik Iben)
• Allows to use the OSSv4 per-application mixer API (supported by 4Front reference OSS implementation, and by FreeBSD-current). (thotypous)
• Allow the use of FormatString tags in --format arguments. (Reuben Thomas)
• Add -j (--jump N{%,,s}) command line option to jump to some position in the current track. (Nuno Cardoso)
• Add the following options: EnforceTagsEncoding (assume, that if encoding of id3v2 is set to ISO-8859-1, then it is actually ID3v1TagsEncoding), FileNamesIconv (conversion of filenames from local encoding to UTF8), NonUTFXterm (conversion of xterm title from UTF8 to local encoding). (Aleks Sherikov)
• Add .oga extension to formats supported by the vorbis plugin.
• When maging item visible (for example, after pressing "next"), scroll it to the middle. (Daniel Kalør)
• Allow seeking to beginning of a file in vorbis/flac. (Daniel Kalør)
• Fix the symbol for "kilo", use "k" (lowercase). (Daniel Kalør)
• Don't run the server if the user doesn't really want to do that when using few commands from command line like --info. (Reuben Thomas)
• Fix race condition when waiting for the end of a file playback. Fixes freez on song changes.
• Change minimum screen height to 7 lines. (Tero Marttila).
• Add '--without-alsa' and '--without-oss' options to configure. (John Fitzgerald)
• Queue messages for display in the client's message area. (John Fitzgerald)