I have just recently started using Amarok in Linux Mint 3.0 and found it starts playing WMA's a half second or so into the song. Any ideas on how to fix this?

I'm having a similar problem under openSUSE 10.3 using Amarok 1.4.8 with the Xine engine. Rather than being half a second or so, it's skipping a full 10 seconds into the song. This is only with WMA files. Amarok has been doing this to me for months, even back when I was using Kubuntu 6.06. Xine plays WMA perfectly.

Can anyone confirm this or suggest a fix?

Probably a xinelib bug.

Mark Kretschmann wrote:Probably a xinelib bug.

Meaning there's no way for me to fix it? :-P Is there any way for me to use xinelib without Amarok so that I can test it? Does Xine (which works much better) not use xinelib? On that note, Xine actually does exhibit a little bit of the problem Amarok has, though not nearly as extreme. Xine seems to miss about 1 second, while Amarok actually starts playing the song (without sound) before the previous song is even finished, so that it seems to miss several seconds.

So there's a list in one place, here's some other people having this problem (also unsolved):
http://amarok.kde.org/forum/index.php?t ... _next=prev
http://amarok.kde.org/forum/index.php/t ... 775.0.html
http://linux.hostweb.com/TopicMessages/ ... fault.aspx (bottom post)
http://www.progressive-comp.com/?l=kde- ... 624473&w=2

have you tried disabling crossfading to see if that helps?

dangle_wtf wrote:have you tried disabling crossfading to see if that helps?

Actually, I tried enabling crossfading to see if it helps, since that was suggested in another thread, but it didn't. I normally have crossfading disabled. Thanks for the suggestion though. Any help is appreciated.

After trying the latest stable Amarok (1.4.7?) release, I tried cross-fading.  Unlike some posters having difficulty with cross-fading/gapless playback, these aspects of Amarok's audio post-processing worked reasonably well for me.

However, I was wondering if Amarok's developers have listened to SqrSoft's cross-fader for Winamp? (http://www.sqrsoft.com.ar/)  With configurable fade in/out envelope and cross-fade levels, I find it's one of the best automatic cross-faders out there.  Many music-head party guests has asked what crossfading software I'm using when they hear SqrSoft's implementation.  Trouble is - it's on Windows, which I really don't care for.

Should we expect any improvements to crossfading and gapless playback in Amarok 2.0, and will it continue to use Xine as a backend?

Amarok's got great potential, and I look forward to the 2.0 release.