AmaroK is absolutely the business for music playback. I've built a playlist with all my music in and set it to shuffle the songs forever. However, after playing the first song it just stops and I have to press the "next" button to play the next track. Why is this? And how do I get around it? I've looked in all the menus for an option to uncheck or whatever, but to no avail.

What version of Amarok and what engine do you use?

xeonman9000 wrote:However, after playing the first song it just stops and I have to press the "next" button to play the next track.

Does this mean, that this only happens after the first song. Or also after every next song?

Does the statusbar say something at the end of the played song?
(Maybe this message ist displayed very short.)

I am using AmaroK version 1.4.1 with the GStreamer 0.10 engine.
It stops playing after every song with the status bar saying "Playing: Song by Artist on Album".

xeonman9000 wrote:I am using AmaroK version 1.4.1 with the GStreamer 0.10 engine.

Amarok 1.4 does not support GStreamer, so I'm wondering how you managed to do this.

I just used theYum installer in Fedora Core 5 to install it in the default way. Can I change the engine somehow?

xeonman9000 wrote:I just used theYum installer in Fedora Core 5 to install it in the default way. Can I change the engine somehow?

Well this alarmed us very much, so I investigated by downloading http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/f ... 5.i386.rpm

It does not have a gstreamer engine.

Are you sure the version of Amarok you are running is 1.4.1? Perhaps you have more then one Amarok installed.

It's definately 1.4.1 with Gstreamer as the screenshots show.
How would I check to see if another version is installed?
I'm also using the x86_64 version of Fedora, if that matters.

you're basically using an unsupported configuration of amarok - as the gstreamer engine is NOT officially part of 1.4.1 - it looks like the maintainer of the package you installed has gone ahead and built the package with highly experimental and incomplete features.

Can you tell us where you got this package? They need a talking-to.

Edit: Ok, I downloaded the AMD64 packages. They package gstreamer 0.10, whereas the i386 does not. 

Hi,

I'm the maintainer of Amarok for Fedora.
I enabled the gstreamer engine on x86_64 because there was no other engine available on this arch. HelixPlayer does not exist there, and we can't ship Xine because it contains mp3 decoding code (the source contains a copy of libmad). MP3 code is patented, and can't be shipped in countries where software patents are legal (sad but true).

As a result, my only option to have at least one engine for Amarok on x86_64 was to re-enable the gsteamer engine for this arch.
I don't like to touch upstream's code, and in genera Fedora avoids doing this, but I (we) saw no other way. If you have a better solution to this problem, I'd be very happy to hear it and to update my package.

I must add that there was no bug report in Fedora's bugzilla indicating that gstreamer did not work on x86_64.

So, any way to make Amarok work on x86_64 (besides lobbying to ban sofware patents) ?

Kubuntu has libxine-main and libxine-extracodecs
http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/libs/libxine-main1
http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/libs/ ... xtracodecs

Both are available for all archs

Also SUSE ships xine without mp3 support, so it is possible to split it up. Does Fedora not ship xine at all then?

Edit - at least I think they do. Certainly lot's of stuff that's problematic due to patents is disabled. I don't think I've ever actually used the official SUSE xine because the first thing I do on a new install is replace it.

Fedora does not ship Xine at all at the moment.

Yes, some distributions ship with non-modified xine. It contains MP3 decoding code, so it is illegal in countries where software patents are authorized. However, in the case of Debian, they probably don't fear being attacked by Thomson/Fraunhofer, since there would not much money to be made by attacking a non-profit. Fedora and Red Hat do not want to take the chance. There are other reasons, see http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Forbidden ... 5eed113bfa if you want more info.

Some other distributions split xine into xine and xine-nonfree (for example). This could be done in Fedora, but has not happened yet since it requires some work (splitting the package, testing that the main package works perfectly without the addon, removing patented code from the tarball in the source package, checking other included codecs for patents, etc...). Work has started in this direction, but there's only one guy on the job, doing all the testing. If people want to help of course, it would be very appreciated.

The default sound framework in Fedora in gstreamer, everything is tested and works fine with it, so there is little interest in bringing Xine in the distribution only for the sake of it. The guy doing the split is our KDE guru, because kde apps tend to prefer Xine (amarok, kaffeine, ...).
I'll try to help him, but for now there is no Xine in Fedora. Any idea how to make amarok work on x86_64 without Xine ?

In reality Thomson/Fraunhofer only care about embedded devices (I've never heard of them even sending a distro a letter, let alone sue, correct me if I'm wrong) and this is all just paranoia.

It does not look so : http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/

Not having done it in the past is not a proof they won't do it in the future (when the revenues from the embedded market are not enough anymore).
Not enforcing a patent to speed up adoption and then enforcing it when everyone uses is a practice that has been done in the past (see the GIF saga).
To calm down the lawyers, we need a written guarantee that Thomson/Fraunhofer will never sue us (or any other Linux provider) about this patent.
Red Hat did contact them, and they did not accept to make that claim.

On top of that, it would not be enough, we need to make sure it is possible to make & sell a derivative of Fedora (this is a right granted by the GPL). Including software patented code would prevent that.

IANAL, so I take the word of the legal department for it.