I'm running Amarok on Fedora, and for the longest time I've had issued with the backends supported by Amarok. Problems I do not seem to encounter with other music players (not that I don't have issues with them, just not this one).

To summarize, if I select the gstreamer backend, playback works fine. Songs play until the very end. But every so often, Amarok does not go on to the next track at the end of the track. When this happens, I see that the progress meter is stuck, either at the beginning of the track, or at some point in it, but clearly the track played to the very end.

If, at this point, I press space to pause playback, the progress indicator jumps to the correct point. Pressing it again, the progress indicator jumps back to the start (or wherever it was stuck).

If I skip forward, playback of the next track starts, but typically with the progress indicator not moving. More often than not, if I pause by pressing space at this point, playback will stop, but I won't be able to make it start again without stopping playback and restarting, or skipping forward.

Sometimes restarting Amarok will resolve this, but often it won't.

So, I try selecting the xine backend instead. Now, the progress meter seems to work pretty consistently, and it never gets stuck at the end of a track. However, using the xine backend, every track has the last second or two chopped off, as if I'd pressed skip forward when the track was almost at the end.

Do people have similar experiences on other distributions, or is this a Fedora-specific issue?

(I have filed the bug with Fedora as https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=674163.)

I use the phonon-vlc backend with no problems (at least none noticed), you should give it a try

google01103 wrote:I use the phonon-vlc backend with no problems (at least none noticed), you should give it a try

I'll try installing the vlc backend.

Still, I figure that if two available backends don't work properly, this is a problem that someone might want to take a look at? If only to blacklist the non-working ones.

rocketsurgeon wrote:I'll try installing the vlc backend.

Installed it, quit Amarok, restarted it, went in and bumped vlc to the top. Then as I pressed Ok, Amarok died with a

Code: Select all

ASSERT: "0" in file /builddir/build/BUILD/phonon-backend-vlc-0.2.0
vlc/effect.cpp, line 46

...which, now that I think about it, seems to be par for the course. Except most of the time bad things only really start happening after changing backends once you start playback after changing backends, not already when closing the config dialog.

Anyway, a restart of Amarok later, and I can conclude that playback with vlc stutters and thus actually works a lot worse than either xine or gstreamer.

You are using an extremely old version of the vlc backend. The current version is 0.3.2, and I don't think it was considered ready for use until 0.3.1. The current version of phonon and phonon-gstreamer are both 4.4.4. What versions are you running? I think there were some serious problems with phonon-gstreamer in 4.4.3 and earlier, but it got a lot more attention for 4.4.4. If you are using 4.4.3 or earlier you really should be using the xine backend, but for 4.4.4 and later gstreamer or vlc is recommended.

Well, I'm kinda stuck with whatever backends are in the Fedora repositories.

A quick checks says:

phonon-backend-xine-4.4.3-2.fc14.i686
phonon-backend-gstreamer-4.4.3-2.fc14.i686
phonon-4.4.3-2.fc14.i686
phonon-backend-vlc-0.2.0-2.fc14.i686