We're talking about two different problems here:

1) "There is no audio channel!" error: amarok 1.4.1 won't play any flac file
2) Amarok playing some flac files, and not others

I experienced the first problem when I tried to upgrade. Even after upgrading xinelib, gxine, etc I still couldn't play flac files. I went back to v1.4.0a.

All the files are stored on a hard drive formatted with FAT32. I'm running Ubuntu Dapper and Windows XP Pro.

I also experience the 2nd problem. Files that I made recently on my Windows XP partition (with EAC for ripping and flac.exe for encoding) will not play in Amarok. I can play them in xmms without a hitch. I can also play them in Foobar2000 on my Windows partition.

I have tried editing ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/xine-config, but as others reported, Amarok changes it back.

I'd love for a solution to be found. Anybody else have any luck?

citizenkeith wrote:1) "There is no audio channel!" error: amarok 1.4.1 won't play any flac file
2) Amarok playing some flac files, and not others

I experienced the first problem when I tried to upgrade. Even after upgrading xinelib, gxine, etc I still couldn't play flac files. I went back to v1.4.0a.

Upgrade to xine-lib 1.1.2, it's definitely fixed.

citizenkeith wrote:I also experience the 2nd problem. Files that I made recently on my Windows XP partition (with EAC for ripping and flac.exe for encoding) will not play in Amarok. I can play them in xmms without a hitch. I can also play them in Foobar2000 on my Windows partition.

No reason why Amarok wouldn't play from NTFS. Define "not play".

Mark Kretschmann wrote:No reason why Amarok wouldn't play from NTFS. Define "not play".

It's FAT32 actually.

Not play? Well, it just skips to the next song. If there are a number of them in a row, amarok skips all of them and starts back up when it encounters a FLAC file that it can read.

citizenkeith wrote:

Mark Kretschmann wrote:No reason why Amarok wouldn't play from NTFS. Define "not play".

It's FAT32 actually.

Not play? Well, it just skips to the next song. If there are a number of them in a row, amarok skips all of them and starts back up when it encounters a FLAC file that it can read.

It should actually play from FAT32, but in general it's a silly idea to use this FS. Collection update will probably not work right. FAT is a simplistic file system invented in the 80s. If you must use Windows, you should be using NTFS.

Mark Kretschmann wrote:It should actually play from FAT32, but in general it's a silly idea to use this FS. Collection update will probably not work right. FAT is a simplistic file system invented in the 80s. If you must use Windows, you should be using NTFS.

My reason for using FAT32 is that NTFS support for linux is not reliable, at least in Ubuntu. I had difficulty writing to the drive when it was formatted NTFS. Since reformatting as FAT32, I've had no problems. I could be wrong, but I don't think this issue is releated.

I just updated to v1.4.1 again, then upgraded to xine-lib-1.1.2. It still gives me the "There is no audio channel!" error.

Mark Kretschmann wrote:

leppiz wrote:I upgraded today my Amarok 1.4.0a to 1.4.1 from kubuntu.org and all my flac-files stopped working. Flac-files give the error "There is no audio channel!". I'm using xine as a backend.

Bug in xine-lib. Upgrade to xine 1.1.2 when released, or use xine CVS. Or get your packager to provide a patched xine-lib.

I've built xine-lib from source and used CVS. This is not solving the problem for me. Any other ideas?

I can assure you that you are not actually using the xine-lib you built. Perhaps you built it but you have another instance installled, or something. I've seen weirder things!

Well, I was directed to this post on the Ubuntu forums...
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php? ... xine+1.1.2

That seemed to do the trick. I suppose this sort of forced Amarok to use the newer xine-lib?

Mark, thanks for all your help on this.

By the way, this also fixed the issue I was expriencing with Amarok not playing certain FLAC files (this was happening in 1.4.0 too).

Thanks for all information, everyone who posted above.

Cheers,
-Aaron

Hi,

  I finally figured out what was going on. As Marc suggested (I think...), it did have to do with libxine 1.1.1 vs 1.1.2. Specifically, having built kde with Konstruct, it was using its own, 1.1.1 version, despite my having installed 1.1.2. I figured this out by chance - I got two different xine-config responses (typing xine-config --version yields the version you are using) depending on whether I queried from inside the KDE environment (using konsole or xterm) and outside (on the slackware commandline).

  Although I think I could have solved this by editing a conf file somewhere, forcing my kde to choose the proper xine-lib installation path, I choose the cowardly approach and installed and built the latest version of konstruct for KDE 3.5.4. All that was left was for me to modify the engine_decoder setting (as mentioned in previous posts), and everything works.

HTH,

Altrus

HankCurt wrote:I had problems getting my flac files to play in amarok using the Xine engine also. The xine player also refused to play them. After some searching on the internet, I found a post that said that ffmpeg didn't handle some flac files correctly. (sorry I've lost the address of the original post). Anyway, the author advised the following change to xine's configuration file:

In the file at ~/.xine/config find the following line

#engine.decoder_priorities.flacdec:0

and change it to

engine.decoder_priorities.flacdec:1

(note that it was uncommented and the value changed to 1)

This solved the problem with the Xine player, however it did not affect Amarok. It turns out Amarok configures the Xine engine with a config file at

~/.kde3.4/share/apps/amarok/xine-config

Just change the

#engine.decoder_priorities.flacdec:0

line to

engine.decoder_priorities.flacdec:1

It worked great for me. Hope you have the same success.

Seeing that there is still some on going discussion about this issue, I thought I would clarifiy some details that I should have included in my original post.

I was using xine-lib-1.1.2    I gather from the other posts here that the 1.1.1 version has some different problems.

I just got done setting Amarok up for someone else, and ran into the problem of the xine-config file getting overwritten.  What I found was that Amarok had to be completely shutdown before making any changes to the ~/.kde3.5/share/apps/amarok/xine-config file.  Be sure that Amarok is not still running down in the system tray.  After I had it completely shut down, my changes to the xine-config file stayed.

This information is still valid for my system.  I am currently running xine-lib-1.1.2-r2 and Amarok-1.4.3 on KDE-3.5.2 using Gentoo.