I have a number of tracks, often radio recordings, that appear very transiently in the play list, but are never actually played.
Other players seem to be able to render the music, so I wonder what Amarok is sensitive to that others are not.

Here is the console output for one of those tracks:

Code: Select all

QWidget::setMinimumSize: (Playlist dock/Playlist::Dock) Negative sizes (310,-1) are not possible
QMap(("album", "Late Junction: Edinburgh International Festival 2012: King Creosote, John Etheridge, John Williams Edinburgh International Festival 2012: 2. King Creosote, John Etheridge, John Williams")("artist", "BBC Radio 3")("context", "")("duration", "2692")("method", "Track.updateNowPlaying")("track", "Late Junction - Edinburgh International Festival 2012: 2. King Creosote, John Etheridge, John Williams 2012-08-24"))
QWidget::setMinimumSize: (Playlist dock/Playlist::Dock) Negative sizes (323,-1) are not possible
"  <lfm status="ok">
    <nowplaying>
      <track corrected="0">Late Junction - Edinburgh International Festival 2012: 2. King Creosote, John Etheridge, John Williams 2012-08-24</track>
      <artist corrected="0">BBC Radio 3</artist>
      <album corrected="0">Late Junction: Edinburgh International Festival 2012: King Creosote, John Etheridge, John Williams Edinburgh International Festival 2012: 2. King Creosote, John Etheridge, John Williams</album>
      <albumArtist corrected="0"/>
      <ignoredMessage code="0"/>
    </nowplaying>
  </lfm>
"
QWidget::setMinimumSize: (Media Sources dock/BrowserDock) Negative sizes (154,-1) are not possible
QWidget::setMinimumSize: (Playlist dock/Playlist::Dock) Negative sizes (325,-1) are not possible


Is there anything obvious in there which should have given me a clue?
If not, I could get the debug log of course, but there was nothing terribly obvious in there either last time I looked.
Those "Negative Sizes" error happen all the time BTW - I presume because I'm not running KDE as my window/session manager.

This is Amarok Version 2.6.0, on 64 bit Fedora 17 (fully updated to latest).

Mark.

what type of music files are these? mp3, flac, ogg or ?

what phonon backend are you using vlc or gstreamer - try switching

This particular file is flac:

-rw-r--r-- 1 mjh users 164415785 Aug 24 05:24 /music/programmes/late_junction/2012/Late_Junction_-_Edinburgh_International_Festival_2012_2._King_Creosote_John_Etheridge_John_Williams_b01m0pzl.flac

I use the gstreamer (4.6.2) Phonon backend currently - which seems to work pretty well, and there is no vlc entry in the list yet - I'll install that backend and see if things improve.

[update]

With that pointer, I also see http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=102437#p248704, and it is true that the VLC backend will play my test track here where the gstreamer backend will not.

Thanks - this may be just what I needed

Mark.

does this occur with all or just some flac files?

Just a very few files seem to be affected like this. There are about 12,000 tracks in my collection here, and I probably hit one like this every two weeks or so (as a proportion of tracks, I'm not sure I could do that calculation with any acceptable error tolerances however ).

so flac are the norm, not the exception in your collection?

can you think of any thing different about the ones that don't play, such as source?

but the ones that don't don't play in Amarok definetly play in other player(s)? which player(s)?

Of 18590 audio files, 5635 are flac, 8012 are ogg, 4384 are mp3, and the rest a few hundreds of numerous other formats, so quite a distribution I guess.
I've tested two files that exhibit this problem in several players.
One common element is that these are digitally downloaded radio shows so are quite large and will have been converted from an original format (m4a/aac probably).

The following players I happened to have available play these files:

Amarok/VLC, alsaplayer, banshee, vlc, ffplay, dragonplayer, gmusicbrowser/gstreamer, gmusicbrowser/flac123, gmusicbrowser/mplayer, mplayer, flac123

The following do not, maybe playing a second or two before moving on to the next playlist item:

Amarok/gstreamer.



I would say it might be a plug-in issue of some kind, but the fact that Amarok/vlc seems to work counts against that hypothesis.
My guess is a phonon/gstreamer issue, but I have not investigated that specifically.

Mark.

If it plays on Banshee and since Banshee uses gstreamer but (iirc) not phonon you could post a bug for phonon-backend-gstreamer on bugs.kde.org. You should probably include a description of the options used during the conversion process on those file

if you rename the file to something short and simple, just to test if the long name or all the "_"'s are problematic

Do you happen to know of any other player that uses a phonon/gstreamer backend? Seem like the logical next quick test to me.

as best as I can tell DragonPlayer and Juk use Phonon but not Kaffeine (it uses xine)

when you tested Dragonplayer what phonon backend was in use? You would need to change the backend using Amarok or systemsettings and then restart the player