Hi everyone, I am a newcomer to KDE after a while using Gnome and I am really enjoying it. I have been trying using Amarok 2.2.1 rather than Rhythmbox and there's a lot I really like about it.

However, it feels far, far less intuitive than Rhythmbox did but I am working to get to grips with it. Unfortunately, I am having one major issue which is driving me mad.

I listen to a lot of internet radio streams and I cannot find out how to add and save a URL into the Cool Streams area. I can temporarily add one to my playlist but it means having to keep doing that each time I switch stations.

Can anyone help please? If I've been shockingly lax and missed something obvious, please point it out as I can't find an explanation anywhere in Amarok or online.

The Cool Streams are provided by the Amarok team, it's not intended for personal user streams and you can't add URLs there.

You can save the streams in your saved playlists and find them from there.

Ok, if that's the only way to do it I'll try it like that, thank you for the response.

However, it does seem like a horribly inefficient way to manage it and a waste of having an area which is designated as Internet->Radio Streams. Surely allowing users to add URLs in that section would be a much tidier and more functional way to work?

The Internet services are provided by either Amarok or by scripts, the "Saved playlist" section is for users saved stuff, mixing both would not be a good idea IMHO, but you can file a wish here:
http://bugs.kde.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=amarok

Oh, and BTW, there is a script available on http://kde-apps.org which you can download through the Script Manager in Amarok which allows you to save radio streams, too.

Thank you, Mamarok, I have that script added now. I also see there are lots of scripts for adding various radio channels in different languages. I'm assuming that was what you meant in your post on Wednesday?

Is there anywhere that can easily explain to a new user how best to write these scripts for adding radio stations please? I've not done it before, but I'm a quick learner and keen to make Amarok work rather than getting grumpy and discounting it.

Well, what the hell, I've downloaded a script someone has already written and I'm going to have a stab at rewriting it to suit my needs! I've not done any coding in quite a long time, but you never learn until you've broken a few systems!

Any advice would be appreciated still, so long as I have a working PC by the end of this

jdthehutt wrote:Well, what the hell, I've downloaded a script someone has already written and I'm going to have a stab at rewriting it to suit my needs! I've not done any coding in quite a long time, but you never learn until you've broken a few systems!

Any advice would be appreciated still, so long as I have a working PC by the end of this

We have a scripting guide on our wiki:
http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Development/ ... _HowTo_2.0

Awesome, have pulled apart some other scripts and have a basic one working now, thank you! I'm getting an odd little audio blip every now and again but think that might be more related to some ongoing audio issues caused by Pulseaudio than Amarok or the script.

Hm, you normally should not have Pulseaudio with Kubuntu, no need to...

Really? Well I haven't installed it myself and it seems to be showing all over the place. This is a fresh install of Kubuntu 9.10 but Pulseaudio is most definitely there.

Must have been dragged in by some metapackage I guess, unfortunately

If you want to get rid of it, uninstall pulseaudio with the purge option, push the pulseaudio entry in the phonon settings to the bottom, remove $HOME/.kde/share/config/phonondevicesrc and an eventuall asound.conf in $HOME and restart KDE so Phonon can reconfigure Alsa to work as default.

I'll try, however I did try removing Pulseaudio from a fresh install of Kubuntu when I first installed it and it completely destroyed my system. Removing just the pulseaudio bits actually took out massive amounts of other applications all the way down to Konsole and even the entire KDE gui system. I was left with just a command prompt.

I'll hopefully do it more carefully this time and check what else gets listed to remove when removing pulseaudio.

well, you can't remove the package libpulse0, since it has some silly dependencies that remove half of the desktop. But if you remove the packages called "pulseaudio" that is pulseaudio, pluseaudio-utils and pulseaudio-module-*, there shouldn't bee any problems.
Do it one by one in a konsole so you can see what it suggests doing and you can still stop it before it removes important stuff.

Oh joy oh bliss, you've resolved my confusion about using 'Pulse audio' listed as a settings option for varied formats of multimedia in my Kubuntu KDE driven system; and answered my query without asking by posting your comment above.
How cool is that!!! You rock, 'Mamarok!' Thanks!!!