Hi!

I have a collection of about 10k songs and have been using amarok to organize it for a couple of years now. It has been a love/hate-relationship all along; that is, I like amaroK (for all the database management features), but it seems that amarok not only ignores my passion for it, but also hates me back. It hated me when I used Debian, it hated me through two installations of Ubuntu and Kubuntu and a couple of Arch distros. And, to no surprise it hates me still.

The problems have been frequent, some annoying to a degree when you are ready to smash your new and expensive as hell Quad-core-based PC with a large hammer, axe it and throw it from the roof of a 12-story high building thereafter urinating from the same roof on its metal wreck.... You get the point I hope.

In the early years of amarok's development bugs were the main problem. Random crashes would arise out of thin air, and after sending 20-30 bug reports I just gave up. Eventually though, they disappeared and I was sort of happy for a while.

But, as with all things in life, it didn't last. Soon my computer was freezing its **** off for no apparent reason. After much teeth grinding and log reading without getting any result I noticed that the problem was caused by amarok. The situation occured either as a result of scrolling through a song (yes, for some unexplainable reason amarok does not like it) or just at random between two songs, amarok would freeze. That is really no problem in itself, just use the good ol' "killall -9" and we are all set again. But when the music is gone and I'm left wondering wtf is going on, I automatically reach for Super+P to bring amaroK up (or for that matter any other global shortcut bound to amarok). And here we get into some real trouble because as soon as I press that combination amarok (for some arbitrary reason) locks the keyboard. X is till running, mouse is still moving, but I cannot type anything so that either I have to do it the Windows way (a la reset button) or log in from another computer and kill off the damn amarokapp (which solves the problem, but is a pain in the ****).

Another problem is the hair-raisingly bad DB-interaction. After 90% of the times amarok crashes I have to do a full rescan of my collection (which can be quite frustrating - god ****, I just wanna listen to some music!). But that's the good part - 'cause it was in those times when I still was using SQLite. Now I have gone over to MySQL, and it's a hell of a lot faster, but the problems have only become more strange indeed. We had a electricity outage last week and my computer was shut off the moment we lost power (and, no, I am not buying a power generator just to keep amarok from shutting down uncleanly). I was of course confident that amarok was able to handle it, since the DB was now run by mysqld. Quite the opposite was the case though. Despite that the collection was intact (for once at least) all the dynamic playlists did not work, all statistics were cleared and no ratings remained. The interesting thing was that *all* labels seemed to be intact (when right-clicking on a track, then Information and going to the Labels tab). That was sort of funny because my dynamic playlists are based on querying those labels. How come they do not work despite that labels have been preserved is not understandable to me. (the whole MySQL-db was intact actually, as far as I could see anyway). And besides, I am sick and tired of a program that **** up the DB whenever you sneeze on it.

And now I'm really **** and want to find out how the heck I keep hearing that people's amarok is stable as an elephant while mine acts like an 80-year old grandma riding one-wheeled bike. Am I doing something wrong?

If anyone has any, and I mean ANY, clues, please share them with me I would have hated going back to MPD

I wouldn't say Amarok is as stable as an elephant... Quite the opposite actually. Mine crashes randomly when I load new music, shuffle tracks or just let it play for a while. I don't think I have ever been able to play it for 2 hours straight without crash. That's actually the reason I found this thread...

I'm on Debian, Amarok 1.4.8, but Amarok was never stable as far as I'm concerned.

If someone actually uses Amarok and doesn't get the constant crashes - I'd love to hear about it too...

Sure - it's rock solid for me under Gentoo, and using Fink on OS X.

I just want to second my experience with the first two posters.
Amarok 1.4.8 Kubuntu Gutsy Xine.
What is the most annoying for me, is the most basic things are working kind of half-way. E.g. out of 2k files only 1k gets organized and then Amarok freezes.

dangle_wtf - it is very pleasing that it runs smoothly on your gentoo box. Although, that alone does not help neither me, nor egork or anews. Please, if you have any kind of good advice on how to keep amarok stable, share it with us.

hey, anews asked!

I can't quite make out from your long post whether you're running KDE, gnome or some other window manager or desktop environment, but in my experience Amarok runs better on a KDE system. Others have had different results, obviously, but it's always been great for me. I'm not getting into a argument over source-based vs binary distros, but in my experience I've always found gentoo with a mix of stable and experimental packages, kept as up-to-date as I can, the most rock-solid base for amarok.
That said, for the last 6 months or so I've been pretty much running OS X exclusively, and in that time, Amarok has crashed maybe 3 times.

Thanks for the reply, dangle_wtf

I am running Openbox actually. And I think you are right about the fact that Amarok seems to be a bit more stable on a KDE system (But although amarok is a kde-app, I am really unsure why it is more unstable while not running KDE - all the same kdelibs and kdeinit are running.) For my part I would rather not run KDE or Gnome - Openbox (and EvilWM) has always been the best alternative for me.

And about src vs bin: I have tried both and for the most part the experience was pretty much the same with both....


Anyway, thanks again, and I am really looking forward to what you guys are doing with Amarok 2 after trying Kutie