In just the last couple of days, Amarok has begun failing to launch on my up-to-date Trusty machine (using default PulseAudio back end). It was working fine before this, and I don't recall any changes I've made that would affect it. All other audio apps (vlc, radiotray, rhythmbox, banshee...) continue to work fine.

All I get when running it is:

Code: Select all

evil@clevo:~$ amarok --debug --nofork
QDBusConnection: session D-Bus connection created before QCoreApplication. Application may misbehave.
amarok: BEGIN: App::App()
amarok:   BEGIN: void App::continueInit()
amarok:     BEGIN: EngineController::EngineController()
amarok:     END__: EngineController::EngineController() [Took: 0.002s]
amarok:     BEGIN: void EngineController::initializePhonon()

(amarok:5584): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: cannot register existing type 'GstObject'

(amarok:5584): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_once_init_leave: assertion 'result != 0' failed

(amarok:5584): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_type_register_static: assertion 'parent_type > 0' failed

(amarok:5584): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_once_init_leave: assertion 'result != 0' failed

(amarok:5584): GStreamer-CRITICAL **: gst_plugin_feature_get_name: assertion 'GST_IS_PLUGIN_FEATURE (feature)' failed

Neither the GUI nor the tray icon appear.

I've tried :

- Cleaning all /var/tmp and /tmp files related to KDE.
- apt-get remove --purge'ing amarok and reinstalling
- removing all amarok config files I could find in /home
- logging out, completely renaming my .kde directory from a terminal and logging back in with a clean session

...yet I'm still stuck with this odd bug.

I'm running out of ideas here - does any Amarok guru recognize these symptoms?

this might help viewtopic.php?f=115&t=110691

I would suggest switching to the phonon-backend-vlc (install package and dependencies then switch to it in systemsettings) and then restarting KDE

The problem is distribution specific and yes, the only solution is to change the phonon backend and use the vlc one.

Thank you two very much for the quick and wise advice! It does indeed work fine using the vlc backend.

Just out of curiosity, why would this suddenly break? If it's an incompatibility between the amarok package and the gstreamer package in the Trusty repos, I'm surprised I couldn't find anyone reporting the same problem on launchpad or the Ubuntu +1 forum. Then again, it wouldn't be the first time I was the first to run into a bug.

Thanks again!

no, the problem is that a codec linker was replaced from the ubuntu codebase, and currently only the gstreamer 1.x library is supported by the new one. Sadly the current phonon-backend-gstreamer does only support the gstreamer 0.10.x llibraries, so upstream broke it for Kubuntu. The bug is well known, search for keywords "gstreamer" or "libav".

The implementation of the gstreamer 1.x libraries into the phonon backend is WIP, but since gstreamer is not easy to work with this takes time.