Hi,

I can\'t seem to find an engine for amaroK that does what I want and does it properly.

Xine just doesn\'t work. It crashes every time I try to do something.

GStreamer works, but it won\'t do crossfades and often, when playing a song, at round about 3min15 it will suddenly skip about half a second and then play the next half a second or so much louder, then continue normally.

aRts works, but it has all the problems associated with aRts: I don\'t want to have to quit amaroK and wait a minute before I can hear audio in, say, Flash animations.

Helix I haven\'t tried because I haven\'t got the RealPlayer backend.

So, which engine would be the best for me to use, bearing in mind that I intend to upgrade to 1.4.x when it appears, and I don\'t want to have to switch engines. How can I fix either Xine or GStreamer or both?

Please let me know if there is anything I can post which would be helpful.

Thanks,
- QS Computing.

Hello ! my problem is -that only the helix engine works-and that not fine-in my amarok! and i tried a lot of different rpm.versions!

no alsa, oss or anything else (gstreamer,art,xine ..-plugins). if i choose one of these engines and restart amarok ..and i want to play some files-it´s running the whole list under in seconds and tellin me that he stopped the playing!
but the helix engine just make  rukkels in sound and works not really clear! so iam not a proffession linux user- but a proffession musician-working with adour with linux suse10 open source on an m-audio delta1010lt-soundcard! and i love amarok!!!! so it has to work! on my last suse 9.3 it had worked fine!!! but there were some other reasons i had to changed to suse 10!
and so now i tried a lot of nights to get it working without the **** helix-engine---but no alternative engine (like xine,gstreamer,..) works.--i became no error-messages --just no playing and sound after double-click on some songs in the playlist,...no wave--no mp3,....it´s running just the list down...! SO PLEASE CAN U HELP ME!!!! everything is working right on my suse-system---but no multimediaplayer like this genial AMAROK!
maybe u know a way easy to configure or make it work,....i need sound on my linux!! THANKS FOR ANSWERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In 1.4 we only recommend xine and helix engines.  the arts engine is removed, as is the gst 0.8 engine.  The gst 0.10 engine is a work in progress, with no crossfade and minimal radio streams support.

Given that you cant get xine working you should try helix - all that is needed is the realplayer distribution.  However, if you post some details about xine and xine-lib on your setup, I imagine we could get you working.