It\'s working fine with the arts engine. gstreamer must have been the problem.

Thanks for helping out.

I just upgraded (via yum) to 1.3.1 (Using KDE 3.4.2-0.fc4.1 Red Hat) on Fedora Core 4 in hopes that this update would fix the gibberish problem. I\'m still having it though. I\'m using the gstreamer engine (helix won\'t play mp3s and aRts doesn\'t seem to work at all) with the autoaudiosink output plugin (I tried others, there is no change.)

I still have a problem where after about 30 or 40 seconds (randomly it seems) the music play will pause for about a second, then proceed playing very very quickly, 4-5x speed, and it sounds like gibberish as described here. If I pause play and resume again, the problem is fixed and play resumes normally.

My install of amarok does not have a Xine engine. How would I go about getting that in there? Compile it myself? Would it be worth trying to add mp3 playback to the Helix engine? I\'ll probably do that next to see if that changes things.

Amarok is by far the best music player I\'ve found (Rythmbox wants to put my library in my home dir somewhere, mplayer isn\'t useful for a large collection, etc.) and I would love to use it. Right now I have a global keyboard shortcut (which is awesome) to toggle play and pause, but I would love to track down the source of this bug.

There might be a package named something like amarok-engine-xine that would have the xine engine for you.

For the Helix Player to play MP3s, you need to correctly configure it with Real Player.

Eean, thanks for the help. I was unable to find packages to supply the xine-backend, so I compiled from source. It was a bit of an adventure installing all of the prereqs, but went fine from there.

Using the Xine-engine backend, my \"gibberish\" playing problem goes away. I would love to use the gstreamer engine, but Xine is working well for me.

I did find that I needed to set up alsa to use dmix (and have Amarok play to plug:dmix) before I could re-start Amarok with xine-engine selected. Otherwise, I got an error \"Xine-engine unable to initilize any sound-devices\" or something similar to that.

thanks again for the help!

GStreamer will probably work better for 1.3.2... right now it is probably playing through oss emulation, which most likely causes slow playback. alsasink has been fixed in 1.3.2, and may be a big improvement.