I was trying to reply to Xatax\'s last post in my previous post BTW.

Also, I don\'t have Foxytunes installed, so please, devs, don\'t try to make it sound like uninstalling Foxytunes solves all my problems.

And what kind of advice is telling your users to change to a distro which includes Amarok in order to be able to use it?

Another thing: I keep hearing Amarok devs blaming problems on the libraries it uses.

I\'ve personally seen gstreamer, xine, and taglib being blamed for Amarok crashing horribly.

Personally, I find this hard to believe. But let\'s say it is true. Wouldn\'t that mean that it\'s time to consider using some libraries that work?

I had a number of problems with amaroK freezing, stuttering, freezing the whole GUI (on other apps) during song changes, getting crud in the OSD, losing the collection, etc.

At one of the developer\'s suggestion, I switched from SQLite to MySQL. Problems solved! Might be worth a try.

(Well not ALL problems solved, the sound system still seems to hang up (sometimes emitting horrendous clicking/squealing sounds) after leaving amaroK runnning for a long time (say a day or so)). Kill/restart solves the problem for another day or so. This is an annoying, but not earth-shattering problem like the others were)

Listen mate,
We do the best we can developing amaroK, and do our best fixing the bugs which are posted on b.k.o.

Developing open source software means the following:

[*]We are not paid, it is our hobby
[*]We have to work with other OSS products

Additionally, since machines which are built on open source platforms, running open source applications are always different to the next computer, it is impossible to cover every single problem.

Who knows, maybe all these problems are to do with you. Just because one application works in a particular way, doesnt mean the other has to.

We also use libraries which suit our needs as developers, and more importantly, suit the requirements of the users. If you want to complain that we don\'t use other \'libraries\', perhaps its time you researched before you whinged. For those of you not satisfied with the Xine engine and its bugs, we have 6 other engines to choose from. We use TagLib because it is super fast, easy to work with, powerful and well documented. Go to the site to see the features. Sure, its not perfect, but it does a damn good job.

For those not satisfied with sqlite, we have mysql and postgresql for you to choose from.

I suggest you stop whining and moaning like a castrated dog, and either choose a different piece of software or help us help you. The best place for that is the irc channel (#amarok - irc.freenode.net).

I suggest you stop whining and moaning like a castrated dog, and either choose a different piece of
software or help us help you. The best place for that is the irc channel (#amarok -
irc.freenode.net).


I have tried, I have asked, and I have moved on.

It was never my intention to whine. I would not have posted to this thread again had it not been for my perception that you were trying to deny that there were problems. My OP was just a rant brought on by unimaginable frustration. Besides, I don\'t use Amarok anymore, so I don\'t have any reason to whine other than to be a pain in the ****, and in that case I would have posted a lot more.

And, like I said in my OP, I acknowledge the fact that I may have broken something. It\'s just that everything else works fine. I don\'t think that that\'s a coincidence.

Maybe when I next do a reinstall I\'ll try Debian or Ubuntu. \'Till then, all of the best.

If you want to complain that we don\'t use other \'libraries\', perhaps its time you researched before you whinged.


I never asked that you use other libraries. I simply pointed out the fact that you guys seems to blame your libs for a lot of problems. No research required.

Personally I don\'t feel that I should have to switch distros to find one that has it by default.

I have tried this many times on various machines with both FC3 and Suse 9.1. So, 3 machines and all of them exhibit the same problem.

I have two kinds of issues, as per my first couple of posts.

1) upon trying to start songs the first couple of times I get a sure crash. Upon subsequent tries it will play even those songs it crashes on. These types of crashes cause me typically, but not always, to just dump me to the desktop. Sometimes I can hear the song start but then it just stops and dumps me out.

2) Other times I will get the request to send e-mail with the error text.

Once I get the songs to start playing I can almost 100% of the time continue to play without issues. After repeated tries even without altering the config, I have the same behavior (multiple attempts but crashes constatnly and then finally it\'ll play).

I do not have foxytune on my computer and I have the latest versions of all the libraries used by amaroK (arts, alsa, gst, taglib, musicbrainz, etc). That is, for all those that I know of.

My opinion on this matter is that this is unstable in that the program does not appear to trap out some errors, and maybe this is impossible at this point. I do know that this is non-standard behavior for any program under any operating system.

My worry is that all the problems will continue to be blamed on the user and the other software instead of a thorough examination of what is causing the issue.

Since I\'m not the only one having problems and since there is an overabundance of those that are able to run it without problems (by without problems I mean relatively free of these issues with some that the persons are willing to overlook) I have to say that this could well be an issue not related solely to amaroK but in how it interacts with other libraries and software.

There are other odd issues. Such as the progress indicator doesn\'t actually progress and some songs are reported as shorter than they really are. The progress indicator never moves but I can click (for a test) in the middle of the progress indicator and cause it to jump to various parts of the song. I attribute the incorrect track length issue to VBR.

I find it inappropriate that comments regarding bug reports be treated with insults to the author of the post. Here is where we come to report problems and get help. Why would the KDE project allow other posters to insult and alienate those coming here.

I know what it means to develop software in your spare time as a hobby project. I know also what it means when the project is loved and people praise your work.

The work here deserves praise. It is one of the best looking and best organized programs (a rarity on the OSS). But it does crash and it crashes nearly as much as I take breaths and there\'s a cause for that. A cause that really should be investigated. Since I\'m not the only one having the problem I think an investigation is warranted.

How about you provide us with some Backtraces, detailed information and logs from console.