Hello All,

My Amarok program has a bug wherein it will perpetually scroll through my playlist but not play a selection. This does not happen every time, perhaps every fifth time I boot up my linux program. I have to do a hard shut down of the program as it will not stop scrolling. Restarting it will not fix the program, rather it requires a full reboot for it to behave normally. Any ideas on what this bug could be?

Your sound device is blocked.
Maybe try disabling crossfading in the options.

Greetings,

Sorry, I do not understand your comments, "Your sound device is blocked. Maybe try disabling crossfading in the options." I do not have other media players going when I use Amarok. I tend to use one media player at a time. It is normal for me, however, to use Amarok; a few web browsers and a word processor simultaneously. Sort of research and write while listening to music. I use Ubuntu Studio (If that helps).

a) How would my sound device be blocked?
b)What do you mean by "crossfading in the options"

Please elaborate, I am a newbie and want to understand.

Thank you very much for you post. I eagerly await your reply.

Sincerely,

-I-

a) System sounds enabled can grab the sound card. Sometimes crossfading can confuse the sound card.
b) Open the Amarok settings dialogue, via the tools menu. Find the crossfading setting, and disable it. See whether that helps.

Hello,

Thank you for your reply. The crossfader is already disabled, hence your solution attempt does not work. Is there anything else I can do?

Thank you for trying!

-I-

I had this problem when the browser Opera and Amarok were booth opened. Closing Opera solved the problem.

Good point - system usage could also be a factor. Even more so if music is on a network share and there's a lot of network traffic going on.

Hello,

As mentioned on my primary e-mail--the only other applications I have running are word processors, internet and ...Amarok. Nothing else. Surely running such minor, low CPU items do not cripple a music player? Perhaps Amarok is a substandard program or hardy heron is too new. I am now using a program called NCMPC and so far that seems to be working better than Amarok. Hopefully the Amarok team will get their excrement together or Hardy Heron will get debugged, which ever comes first. 

IKhider wrote: Perhaps Amarok is a substandard program (...) Hopefully the Amarok team will get their excrement together (...)

Easy there, that's just a plain and rude insult. Sure, amarok has some bugs and, sure, it used to crash a lot. I've been using amarok for several years and have myself experienced the frustration caused by instability. Most of those issues have been resolved over time though and with some additional tweaking (turning crossfading off, switching to mysqld, not tampering with external devices too much, etc) you can get pretty long uptimes without crashes.

As for your problem: It's Heron's fault. I believe it has something to do with the fact that they went from using ALSA to using Pulseaudio. Many people have complained because the transition has been far from painless. That's why try changing output plugin (Tools->Settings->Engine) to "pulseaudio". If that does not solve the problem, try to migrate your whole system to Pulseaudio: go to Gnome: System -> Preferences -> Sound and change all values to Pulseaudio. This will probably cause some problems with other programs, but that's just a matter of configuring those particular programs to use Pulseaudio.

Hello MON,

Well I certainly want Amarok to work, it is an attractive interface and I like the idea of album art popping up while a song plays. Rhytyhmbox is also quite good in that respect (this one has bugs too though). Even when I was using Gutsy Gibbon the problem with Amarok was the same--buggy program, incessant scrolling. The idea that a browser or some minor program can thwart it does not bode well. I will apply the changes you mentioned, thanks for that--just so long as I do not have to configure my whole system around Amariok which would be quite silly.

Certainly Hardy Heron may be at fault(I use Ubuntu Studio), as I mentioned, the operating system is recent so it may take a while to get things on track. Meanwhile NCMPC still works. NCMPC: 1 Amarok: 0

Ooohh, and there is another media player software called  http://moc.daper.net/  looks stable, check it.

MOC-player is really very nifty, you are right about that. I run it on my 8-year old laptop and ran it before I switched to amarok. What I really appreciate is its minimalistic approach plus that it has a kind of threaded frontend/player structure which makes it possible for the interface to be detached and closed while player itself is still running in the background as a daemon. Of course, it is short of many features, too (no tag editing, no statistics, organizing playlists by hand can be sort of a chore, etc.), but, hey, it's light wright

Anyways, good luck with your configuration. Let us know whether it worked or not.