I'm running Amarok 2.0.2 on Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope, 9.0.4.  Whenever I pause a song, I cannot unpause it again.  The button becomes the pause symbol (as opposed to the play symbol, which shows while paused) but the song does not play, nor does the timecode move forwards.  Attempting to play another song does nothing - the new song appears, but no sound is played.  The only way to continue listening to music is to close Amarok.  I then need to go into System Monitor and kill the process before I can restart it.

Has anyone experienced anything similar?  Any advice?

Make sure that you are using the Phonon-xine backend, not the GStreamer backend (it's still buggy).

You can configure this in the KDE systemsettings, in the Multimedia (or Sound) module.

...additionally, I've just heard from another developer that PulseAudio may be causing issues in Jaunty. So you might want to remove it from your system, and just use direct ALSA output.

I'm definitely using the xine backend, when I run Amarok from the terminal the first part of the startup text confirms it.

I sometimes get an error message when starting Amarok, stating that  "the audio playback device HDA INTEL (HCA883 Analog) does not work, falling back to Pulseaudio."  It's in these instances that I have the pause issues.  For this reason I'm uncertain about disabling Pulseaudio.

Try Systemsettings->Multimedia->Audiooutput:
Select PulseAudio (or esound or jack) and move it to the top of the list. Now you have a soundserver, which can handle multiple inputstreams of audio. Selecting the hardware/ALSA/phonon will cause trouble, if more than one application accesses the soundcard.
Check if there are other apps (KDE Systemsounds as a candidate) try to playback.

Greetings
m0nk

Dieter Schroeder wrote:Try Systemsettings->Multimedia->Audiooutput:
Select PulseAudio (or esound or jack) and move it to the top of the list.

I fear that this is exactly what should *not* be used. Pulseaudio is extremely buggy and managed to kill my sound repeatedly in Jaunty. The best solution for me was to remove the .kde/share/config/phonondevicesrc after having moved pulseaudio to the bottom of the list to force the phonon-xine to effectively use my soundcard.
Also, pulseaudio is not used in KDE normally, it still wonder how it showed up in my Kubuntu...

Can't see this here on suse 11.1, KDE 4.2.2 with pulseaudio 0.9.12. Had the problem with kaffeine, which didn't really exit and stayed in background, where it blocked my sounddevice. Amarok came up with the error stated above. Using Alsa will force amarok to use your soundcard exclusively.
But euchrid can try (perhaps another soundserver, too). Trial and error, as it is not dangerous, just annoying.

Greetings
m0nk

Dieter Schroeder wrote:Can't see this here on suse 11.1, KDE 4.2.2 with pulseaudio 0.9.12. Had the problem with kaffeine, which didn't really exit and stayed in background, where it blocked my sounddevice. Amarok came up with the error stated above. Using Alsa will force amarok to use your soundcard exclusively.
But euchrid can try (perhaps another soundserver, too). Trial and error, as it is not dangerous, just annoying.

In fact ALSA does have its own facility for sound mixing, called "DMIX". So PulseAudio is not necessarily required just for playing multiple audio sources at the same time.

PS: Google for DMIX to learn more about it.

You're right with the dmix plugin, but that didn't worked as I've stated above. Perhaps because both applications use the xine-engine. Anyway it won't do any harm to test it. Btw. here's my .asoundrc

---snip---
# PulseAudio plugin configuration

pcm.pulse {
    type pulse
}

ctl.pulse {
    type pulse
}

# As default!

pcm.!default {
    type pulse
}

ctl.!default {
    type pulse
}
---snap---

And as euchrid wrote his ALSA device is NOT accessible.

Greetings
m0nk