using amarok-2.1-beta3 (rev 968417) which i compiled from svn, i cannot get either gstreamer-0.1 or xine-0.2.60 engines to work fully.

firstly, i should note that changing the backend through amarok's config causes a crash which i have reported here: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=192813

as for the engines themselves:

gstreamer but does not handle fadeout correctly. it will stop very briefly, restart for a few seconds and then fade out. other than that, though, it works perfectly for me.

xine is much worse. it skips the first few seconds of the track, then stutters for a few seconds before it starts to play normally. sometimes it will also start speeded-up for a few seconds and then the sound will break up several times. it does not fade out at all - it just keeps playing for a few seconds, then stops abruptly.

the thing is, are these problems caused by bugs in the engines, bugs in amarok, or both? i'm not sure how to report them (which is mainly why i'm posting here).

whatever the case, i hope they get fixed soon.

finally, i'd just like to say congrats to the amarok team for all the great progress that has been made so far - i'm sure there is even more cool stuff to come

it looks like the problems were caused by the pulseaudio setup on my system (mandriva 2009.1).

when i disabled pulseaudio via drakconf, all the problems with xine disappeared.

fadeout still doesn't work with the gstreamer backend, but perhaps that's not surprising given how new gstreamer is.

found a further refinement to this problem.

rather than disable pulseaudio entirely, i have now turned off its ironically-named Glitch-Free Mode. this has fixed all the playback problems i was having with xine (but still no luck with gstreamer).

mandriva has a handy configuration option for this in drakconf, but the same effect can be achieved by changing this line in /etc/pulse/default.pa:

    load-module module-hal-detect

to:

    load-module module-hal-detect tsched=0

apparently the root cause of the problem here is that some alsa drivers cannot handle "timer-based audio scheduling" (whatever the heck that is). for the record, my soundcard is a xonar d1 which uses the snd_virtuoso driver.

anyway, hope this is of some help to anyone having the same issues as i was.