I\'ve been using amaroK 1.2.3 for about a month now and have had nothing but headaches of dismay. Here are the list of issues I have with it.

Stats:
Engine: Gstreamer 0.8.9 / gst-plugins 0.8.8
Kernel 2.6.11
kdelibs 3.4
amaroK compile with the following flags:
gstreamer, kde, kdeenablefinal, mad, mysql, oggvorbis and opengl.

1. When compiling, sound cuts out. Sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes for longer. My buffer size in /etc/asound.conf is buffer_size 65636 which has no effect. CPU utilisation makes no difference. If a package is compiling, amaroK skips.

2. After X amount of time (time varies), amaroK seems to be playing my tracks but no sound. In fact, the systray icon shows the track playing. The oddity about this is that the tracks \"fast forward\" themselves playing every track without sound and passing through the track really fast.

3. Audioscrobbler plugin fails frequently.

4. Sometimes I have to initialise amaroK more than once to get it to actually open up.

Should I fill out bug reports or is this fine?

Thanks

Amoeba wrote:

I\'ve been using amaroK 1.2.3 for about a month now and have had nothing but headaches of dismay. Here are the list of issues I have with it.

Stats:
Engine: Gstreamer 0.8.9 / gst-plugins 0.8.8
Kernel 2.6.11
kdelibs 3.4
amaroK compile with the following flags:
gstreamer, kde, kdeenablefinal, mad, mysql, oggvorbis and opengl.

1. When compiling, sound cuts out. Sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes for longer. My buffer size in /etc/asound.conf is buffer_size 65636 which has no effect. CPU utilisation makes no difference. If a package is compiling, amaroK skips.

2. After X amount of time (time varies), amaroK seems to be playing my tracks but no sound. In fact, the systray icon shows the track playing. The oddity about this is that the tracks "fast forward" themselves playing every track without sound and passing through the track really fast.

3. Audioscrobbler plugin fails frequently.

4. Sometimes I have to initialise amaroK more than once to get it to actually open up.

Should I fill out bug reports or is this fine?

Thanks

You missed a few wonderful things, what your cpu is, what your ram is, what compile flags you used for optimization, if you enabled debugging.

Also if it\'s doing these things, getting debug output is useful actually and can help us determine what\'s going on. As far as the output of sound, what \'sink\' is gstreamer using for output?

alsasink or ossink?

alsasink isn\'t perfect, osssink works better for the record.

As far as compiling, that\'s related to how gstreamer works, that\'s a limitation in gstreamer not amarok. amaroK does not actually play the music, it just tells gstreamer to do so.

Anything else I missed?

damm wrote:
You missed a few wonderful things, what your cpu is, what your ram is, what compile flags you used for optimization, if you enabled debugging.

Also if it\'s doing these things, getting debug output is useful actually and can help us determine what\'s going on. As far as the output of sound, what \'sink\' is gstreamer using for output?

alsasink or ossink?

alsasink isn\'t perfect, osssink works better for the record.

As far as compiling, that\'s related to how gstreamer works, that\'s a limitation in gstreamer not amarok. amaroK does not actually play the music, it just tells gstreamer to do so.

Anything else I missed?

CPU: Athlon XP 2200+
RAM: 1.265 GB DDR 2700
Optimisation flags: -O2 -march=athlon-xp -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -msse -mmmx -m3dnow
Did not compile with debug support
Using alsalink

You lost me with gstreamer...

What makes osslink better than alsalink? If alsalink is so ****, why make it a choice?

So are you suggesting to recompile with debug and oss support?

Thanks

Amoeba wrote:

damm wrote:
You missed a few wonderful things, what your cpu is, what your ram is, what compile flags you used for optimization, if you enabled debugging.

Also if it\'s doing these things, getting debug output is useful actually and can help us determine what\'s going on. As far as the output of sound, what \'sink\' is gstreamer using for output?

alsasink or ossink?

alsasink isn\'t perfect, osssink works better for the record.

As far as compiling, that\'s related to how gstreamer works, that\'s a limitation in gstreamer not amarok. amaroK does not actually play the music, it just tells gstreamer to do so.

Anything else I missed?

CPU: Athlon XP 2200+
RAM: 1.265 GB DDR 2700
Optimisation flags: -O2 -march=athlon-xp -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -msse -mmmx -m3dnow
Did not compile with debug support
Using alsalink

You lost me with gstreamer...

What makes osslink better than alsalink? If alsalink is so ****, why make it a choice?

So are you suggesting to recompile with debug and oss support?

Thanks

I\'m suggesting you to change it to ossink and see if the same problems exist.

It\'s a setting in amarok to tell gstreamer to use alsasink or ossink.

Very simple, try it and let us know.

gstreamer....he means that amaroK doesn\'t actually play music, it just tells gstreamer what to play. Problems involving sound cutting out, choppiness, etc., mean that gstreamer is having the problem. So the solution is to muck around with gstreamer, not amaroK. To put it another way, in your problem one, it\'s not amaroK that\'s skipping, it\'s gstreamer.

Have you tried any other sound engines?

As for audioscrobbler, I know that it\'s pretty common to have errors communicating with scrobbler, and I think everytime I\'ve seen this discussed, the problem was audioscrobbler\'s. This goes for a number of different players, including those on Windows.

mlmitton wrote:

gstreamer....he means that amaroK doesn\'t actually play music, it just tells gstreamer what to play. Problems involving sound cutting out, choppiness, etc., mean that gstreamer is having the problem. So the solution is to muck around with gstreamer, not amaroK. To put it another way, in your problem one, it\'s not amaroK that\'s skipping, it\'s gstreamer.

Have you tried any other sound engines?

As for audioscrobbler, I know that it\'s pretty common to have errors communicating with scrobbler, and I think everytime I\'ve seen this discussed, the problem was audioscrobbler\'s. This goes for a number of different players, including those on Windows.

AS is about as stable as a joke, err... I don\'t depend on it for anything, it\'s just a novelty trinket.

But as I said, try osssink because it may solve his woes. Not every media player handles ALSA properly. As it should, but doesn\'t always. I\'ve found that xine outputs 100x better to ALSA then gstreamer.

But as far as a buffer in asound.conf that\'s pretty worthless because 65535 byte buffer can be eaten up without trying. When your system is starved for I/O, reading a mp3 may take 2-3seconds longer. Then that 65535 dont\' look so hot anymore do it?

... amaroK has multiple sound engine support, try them play around until you find something you like. You\'d be suprised.

Alrighty, I\'ve switched over to osssink. Let\'s see how that goes....

I forgot to mention this:

Playback crossfader: When using the crossfade found in playback, tracks start at a low level then about 5-10 seconds into the track, sound jumps back up to normal.

@mlmitton

I realise what role the \"engine\" plays. I wasn\'t sure what damm meant with his comment about gstreamer...

I\'ve tried amarok with xine, arts and gstreamer. xine lacks mpc support. Arts... well, arts is arts. I haven\'t tried xmms. Not to sure I want too...

Amoeba wrote:

@mlmitton
(...) xine lacks mpc support. ...

If you feel up to the task, go and check out xine-libs from cvs, compile, install and enjoy mpc support with the xine backend. I have been using it for the last couple of months and it is working fine.

Quimbaya wrote:

Amoeba wrote:

@mlmitton
(...) xine lacks mpc support. ...

If you feel up to the task, go and check out xine-libs from cvs, compile, install and enjoy mpc support with the xine backend. I have been using it for the last couple of months and it is working fine.

Thanks for that tip. I tried xine-libs before and liked it. I just didn\'t like the no mpc support but now I have something to look into...

I installed xine-lib 1.0.1, which has musepack support, and all seems to work better. Thanks for the help.

Post edited by: Amoeba, at: 2005/05/17 08:45

I\'d also like to add that using the xine engine, stopping or pausing a track is immediate rather than delayed 2 seconds as my experience with gstreamer...

\"Playback crossfader: When using the crossfade found in playback, tracks start at a low level then about 5-10 seconds into the track, sound jumps back up to normal.\"

Same problem here with a recent SVN Version (checked out yesterday) and gstreamer 0.8.10.

Psy wrote:

"Playback crossfader: When using the crossfade found in playback, tracks start at a low level then about 5-10 seconds into the track, sound jumps back up to normal."

Same problem here with a recent SVN Version (checked out yesterday) and gstreamer 0.8.10.

I second this. Too bad. I like the crossfader function. The xine engine doesn\'t seem to have a crossfader... Unless I\'m wrong.

Yeah, unfortunately the crossfader doesn\'t work with xine, it\'s unstable.

My preference is only to have fade-out during unscheduled song changes and stops. SInce most songs already have a fade-out or fade-in, I just like some overlap, but no fading.