I'm stuck with using Centos 5.2 at work - and the only thing that makes this bearable is the ability to listen to music whilst I work.

Centos provides a precompiled version of AmaroK (1.4.10) which installs nicely - however, it refuses to play mp3 files. ("the
xine engine reports that it cannot play mp3 files....").

I've had various suggestions about how to fix this, none of which have worked. The most recent failures include:
install xine-lib-extras-nonfree - NOPE
install libmad - NAH
install mpg321  - NIET
install libmad  - AGGGHHHH

Can someone please suggest some other libraries that I can pointlessly install on to my system.

Cheers, Jon

Okay it's fixed - but I haven't got the foggiest as to what fixed it.

First I uninstalled every sodding library related to amarok including the xine ****.
Oh, and I deleted ~/.xine ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok ~/.kde/share/config/amarokrc (this did not fix the problem i.e. I tried this before anything else)

Then I installed
(1) xine and xine-libs from rpmforge
(2) installed amarok from epel
(3) I created a couple of symbolic links that yum complained about (/usr/lib64/libcdio.so.6 and /usr/lib64/libiso9660.so.4) - but still wouldn't let me install xine-lib-extras-nonfree
so ... (4) installed xine-lib-extras-nonfree (from livna the fc6 version) I had to do this with rpm -ivh --nodeps xine-lib-extras-nonfree-1.1.6-1.lvn6.x86_64.rpm

Then I tried amarok - it said that it couldn't find a sound engine, so I went to the configure amarok option and selected the engine properties and manually pointed xine to use ALSA.

Then my mp3s came back to life!!!!



If you can find which one of these was responsible for making it work ..... good luck. I don't give a ****.

Cheers, Jon

angry by name, angry by nature, huh?
Glad you got it working - it was probably all of the above.

LOL - actually I'm normally quite mild mannered - but a bit like a duck, whilst on the surface all looks serene, underneath the water I'm paddling like crazy!

Today's anger inducing moment = performing a yum update, a newer version of xine-lib (1.1.15-1) was downloaded from the epel repository - and of course this stopped mp3
playback from working. Then I spent ages trying to track down exactly what version of xine-lib was installed previously (1.1.13-3), tried downgrading - didn't fix it. So had a F*** IT
moment, slagged the lot of it - i.e. uninstalled the lot, then followed my instructions from yesterday to reinstall (including deleting the configuration folders .xine, amarok, amarokrc).
Now I have a working mp3 player again.

Next time it fails I'll try to learn from the error and try just deleting the config folders first.

Today's lesson - never update your machine.

Cheers, Jon