Hi,

I'm new to Amarok. I played with it briefly on Ubuntu 8.04 and now I have 9.10 I saw that Amarok 2.2 came bundled.
I had to add xsine to get it to run on 64bit, but apart from that it seems fine.

I have firefly daap server on the LAN and I see that Amarok supports it, but I can;t find anything in the UI to add in the URL. I found this:
http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Music_Sharing

But the instructions don't match the UI so presumably they are out of date.

Help appreciated.

Bump

I have a firefly DAAP-share in my network as well and it's automatically detected, no configuration is, nor should be, needed.
Perhaps your firefly is not announcing itself on the network?

Amarok does not see my firefly (mt-daapd) server either! The server is running and detects the IP of my client machine where it says "Serving xml-rpc method," but I do not see a way in Amarok to find and play the firefly streams. btw, an older machine with v1.4 still sees and plays from the server.

If Amarok is automatically detecting firefly and the firefly server "sees" the client machine, then where is it? How can I troubleshoot this?

thx,
feffer

feffer wrote:Amarok does not see my firefly (mt-daapd) server either! The server is running and detects the IP of my client machine where it says "Serving xml-rpc method," but I do not see a way in Amarok to find and play the firefly streams. btw, an older machine with v1.4 still sees and plays from the server.

If Amarok is automatically detecting firefly and the firefly server "sees" the client machine, then where is it? How can I troubleshoot this?

thx,
feffer

I suggest upgrading to Amarok 2.3 and running it from terminal like this:

amarok --debug --nofork 2>&1 | tee log

And look through log to find any mentioning of DAAP.

Actually I was running ver 2.3. The debug log showed multiple references to Daap, but I did not get any leads from it. However, searching my firefly logs, I found reference to authorization errors. When Amarok 2.3 launches, it wants access to kwallet; I'm not really sure why as ver 1.4 didn't need this. Previously, I had given 2.3 the access it asked for, so now I tried denying it. Amarok still opened, but now in the left panel under "Local" I saw my daap share as well as the music directory on my hdd.

On a second machine booting Kubuntu 9.10 running Amarok 2.2, I got the same result: giving Amarok kwallet access broke daap music sharing, while denying kwallet access allowed it (a logout-login was required). This was not very good behavior, or very intuitive, but I thought I was done. Not so! On the same machine, rebooting to sidux (debian sid) running Amarok 2.3, I could not get music share access either way.

While this may not exactly be an Amarok bug, there is clearly an issue here. Why does Amarok even need access to kwallet? Any way to get Amarok to open without calling to kwallet? What can I do about Amarok on my sidux install (this is my main distro)?

thx,
feffer

After some time, I found the reason why Amarok 2.x could not connect to my Firefly (daap) server. Some debian based distros might not include the following: libnss-mdns and avahi-daemon. These are necessary for Amarok to automagically locate and connect to a Firefly (daap) server. Kubuntu included these, but another debian sid distro (sidux) did not. After installing them in sidux, Amarok was able to recognize and play music from Firefly.

It seems to me that Amarok should give the user some feedback when trying to use a daap server. In that sense, Amarok 1.4 behavior was better than 2.x Having a daap server "automagically" appear may be "clever," but it is a nuisance for users who are trying to troubleshoot why their daap music is no longer available. I found the answer somewhat by chance on the sidux forum. This after extensively searching here! Please understand, I'm not ranting. Rather offering constructive criticism and a suggestion.

Regards,
feffer

Some problem with Amarok Version 2.4.1 Using KDE 4.6.90 (4.7 RC1) still persists. All DAAP shares show up in "local Music", however, none of them are playable when using Firefly.
Tracing the connection using Wireshark, there is not even a requests being sent to Firefly. Nothing whatsoever.
The statusbar in Amarok says "playing xxxxx", but there is no track advance indicator and of course nothing plays.
I started Amarok using the debug command in Konsole, but there is nothing that would indicate an error. Only the usual messages.
Firefly work using iTunes on another machine.

Same here.
After spending quite some time to configure the avahi stuff right, amarok shows up the remote DAAP Collection, but won't play any songs from it.
Wireshark shows no connection being made, amarok shows "playing ..".
I just tried amarok 2.4.3 instead of the gentoo "stable" version 2.4.0, no difference except i had to re-enable the DAAP plugin.

Edit: just solved it.
When using gstreamer as phonon backend, daap playback doesn't work.
I installed the xine backend for phonon (on gentoo: useflag "xine", emerge phonon) and configured phonon to use xine as default (move it to the top using kde settings).
Now amarok plays daap songs just fine.

julakali - fyi the xine backend is no longer maintained so you may encounter problems in the future, have you tried the vlc backend?

Using phonon-vlc, i don't get any sound coming from my speakers. Not even with the "test" button included in the kde phonon config UI.
Amarok "plays" DAAP songs with phonon-vlc, though.
Maybe vlc is using a hidden mixer that is set to "mute" or something.

Why does it not work using gstreamer? Do i need a specific gstreamer plugin to play DAAP songs?

julakali wrote:Why does it not work using gstreamer? Do i need a specific gstreamer plugin to play DAAP songs?

Yes it does: You need the gstreamer soup plugin.
On Gentoo, emerge gst-plugins-soup.
This should be somehow covered by useflags and dependencies, but i guess thats not amaroks problem.

@google01103: thanks for your answer, otherwise i would have just stayed with phonon-xine, now the real problem is solved