after upgrading distro from kubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 and amarok 1.4 to amarok 2.0.2, either amarok  and dragonplayer won't play files with spaces embedded in either the name or the path. The upgrade removed amarok 1.4 and replaced it by 2.0.2. It doesnt seem to be a matter of the sound system because they will play any format they used to play before the upgrade as long as, as I said, theres no spaces in the names. Characters like parenthesis, brackets, undescores, hypens, etc are ok,  as well as central european characters. It doesnt seem to be a problem with tags either because some of those files that are being played have tags with chinese and or central european characters. The same music collection (on an ntfs volumen) is being used from an opensuse partition which had amarok 2 installed from the beginning without a problem, same as did amarok 1.x on this kubuntu partition. I tried to play the files from the command line, with or without quotation marks but theyre jut not recognized.. The collection is scanned perfectly by amarok. I already deleted the ~/kde/share....amarok directory. Adept says nothings broken, etc etc. When I play the same files from either dolphin or the cli mplayer or xine will just play them as theyre supposed to. Did anybody stumble upon something like this before??

tia

I can confirm this behaviour in some way. I'm also using ubuntu 9.10 and amarok 2.0.2 from the package manager (2:2.0.2mysql5.1.30-0ubuntu3 is the installed version).
Strangely enough, this issue appears only with some files on a FAT32 volume. For Example, I have a file named "Porcupine Tree - 01 - Blackest Eyes.mp3". When I add it to the playlist, the entry just states the filename with length 0:00. I can play it with a double click, but tags aren't loaded at all. When I rename the file to "Blackest Eyes.mp3" (with a space), it is recognized just fine. Copying the file to an ext3 volume (with the original filename) makes amarok load the file properly.
So I'm not quite sure if this is really an amarok issue. However, other players load and read the files with no problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
jaschau

The same problem with spaces file name has happened to me. After upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04 Amarok has been upgraded to v.2.0.2 (KDE 4.2.2). There were no problems with the previous version.

I have tried to rename files removing spaces and Amarok did play them.

Please try removing Pulse Audio.  Jaunty uses it by default as the Phonon backend and it causes all sorts of madness.  Ensure you are using the Xine backend to Phonon and see if that helps.

Thanks!

(By the way: 2.1 will be out soon too, which brings with it a *ton* of improvements and bug fixes.)

I too had this problem when upgrading from 8.10 to 9.04 with Xubuntu.

Jeff, thanks for pointing me in the right direction to find the solution.  I went to remove Pulse Audio like you suggested; however, it was not on my system, which left only Phonon as the culprit.

On my system, the upgrade probably  changed the back end from the phonon-backend-xine to the phonon-backend-gstreamer package.  To be on the safe side, I removed phonon and the phonon-backend completely, along with whatever synaptic said it would also remove, which included amarok.  Then I just reinstalled amarok and made sure that it grabbed the phonon-backend-xine package too.

Good luck,

flyingcadet

Ah, yep, there are all sorts of strange gstreamer backend issues too. 

Is Fluendo still contributing to the gstreamer-phonon backend or did they think once KDE 4 was released they could leave it to others? I would think they would want to get these types of issues sorted out sooner rather than later. The yauap engine seems to work fine on Amarok 1.4, which would seem to indicate this is something with phonon-gstreamer as opposed to something with gstreamer itself.

Later, Seeker

seeker5528 wrote:Is Fluendo still contributing to the gstreamer-phonon backend or did they think once KDE 4 was released they could leave it to others? I would think they would want to get these types of issues sorted out sooner rather than later. The yauap engine seems to work fine on Amarok 1.4, which would seem to indicate this is something with phonon-gstreamer as opposed to something with gstreamer itself.

The Phonon-GStreamer backend is actually being maintained by QtSoftware.

FWIW, that "yauap" engine you mentioned has given us a lot of headaches. I wish it had never been created in the first place. The thing was created by an intern at SUSE, was hardly maintained, and had countless bugs.