I can't get amarok to play anything.  It worked fine up to a while ago, then a period of inactivity with several updates, now nothing.  If requested to play a long playlist, amarok goes through it very fast, then stops.

I'm running Linux FC-5 with all updates.  The sound engine is gstreamer-0.10.9-0.gst.1.5 .  Amarok version is amarok-1.4.1-3.fc5 .

I've tried the advice in the FAQ to run the following pipeline:
  $ gst-launch filesrc location=/home/foo/bar.mp3 ! spider ! audioscale ! audioconvert ! alsasink
  WARNING: erroneous pipeline: no element "spider"
  $ gst-launch filesrc location=/home/foo/bar.mp3 !  audioscale ! audioconvert ! alsasink
  WARNING: erroneous pipeline: no element "audioscale"
 

Sure enough, $ gst-inspect doesn't report these elements.

What's going on?  How can I get amarok going again?

Thanks - jon

Unfortunately, you're using an unsupported version of amarok.

the gstreamer engine is not included in official releases - for support with your version, you will need to contact your distribution's amarok package maintainer.

I haven't used Fedora in a while myself, but you might want to look at the livna repository. They have seem to have packages with 'non-free' extras for amarok as well as xine. I'm guessing those would allow you to run amarok with the xine engine, which, unlike GStreamer, is currently a supported engine.

Is there any convenient way to find out how gstreamer is being invoked?  There seems to be a lot of debug stuff in the source, but no info on how to use it.

Again, you're not supposed to use the GStreamer engine at all. Fedora has packaged an unfinished and unsupported engine (which will be rectified in future releases).

Use the xine-engine instead.

Does Mr. Kretschmann's note mean that future versions of amarok will support the gstreamer engine or that future Fedora releases will not support amarok with gstreamer in any way?

I gather from the comments that amarok developers don't like gstreamer.  Are they having technical problems with gstreamer, or do they lack gstreamer expertise, or is there some other problem?  What is the problem here?  If gstreamer is not useful, I'd like to stay away from it.  Otherwise I'd like to take a look at fixing amarok, which seems to almost work with gstreamer.

the gstreamer engine for amarok is under development, is incomplete, and is currently unsupported. It is not intended for public use.

Future versions of amarok may re-include gstreamer support if all goes well, however there are no guarantees.

You could contact the amarok mailing list with your offer to help get the gstreamer engine working with the same features as the other engines - the address is on amarok's homepage http://amarok.kde.org

The Amarok mailing list subscription page, which is at https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/amarok, is not hard to find via Google, but doen't seem to be referenced by the Amarok home page, or the wiki, or the FAQ, or anywhere else that I conld find.  Maybe someone with access to the Amarok site can fix this.

Thanks - jon

jonrysh@pacbell.ne wrote:Does Mr. Kretschmann's note mean that future versions of amarok will support the gstreamer engine or that future Fedora releases will not support amarok with gstreamer in any way?

I gather from the comments that amarok developers don't like gstreamer.  Are they having technical problems with gstreamer, or do they lack gstreamer expertise, or is there some other problem?   What is the problem here?  If gstreamer is not useful, I'd like to stay away from it.  Otherwise I'd like to take a look at fixing amarok, which seems to almost work with gstreamer.

He means that in the future, Fedora has promised to not package gstreamer for their amd64 architecture anymore (which may mean dropping Amarok from their amd64 distro entirely).

jonrysh@pacbell.ne wrote:The Amarok mailing list subscription page, which is at https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/amarok, is not hard to find via Google, but doen't seem to be referenced by the Amarok home page, or the wiki, or the FAQ, or anywhere else that I conld find.  Maybe someone with access to the Amarok site can fix this.

Fixed. Now there's a link "Mailing List".