read the subject because i have no idea which is better, or how to even get gstreamer to work

you answered your own question. gstreamer isn't worth putting any effort in unless your having some problems with arts. I think gstreamer is intended more for non-KDE platforms and for future use (KDE might switch to gstreamer).

I'm currently using amarok with latest gstreamer with zero problems! Actually I hope that all application (either KDE, Gnome and anything else) will use gstreamer as a backend. Then I could stop running artsd. My hardware supports sound mixing, so artsd is only an extra resource hog.

I think the answer is here:

http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/d ... und-server

you can use both ...

what about the xine backend

On my iBook I found that artsd would randomly crash, and the KDE people haven't responded to my bug report for about a month. So I switched to gstreamer, and it seems like it should be better, except that it leaks memory.

Does anyone else notice this, or is it just me? Amarok was leaking pretty bad, so I tried like "gst-launch-0.8 filesrc location=/home/toojays/117_.mp3 ! mad ! alsasink", and that leaked . . . it also leaked playing Ogg Vorbis files. This is with gstreamer-0.8.5 and gst-plugins-0.8.3.

So for now, I still don't have a solution I like. XMMS using OSS emulation works fine (it's not so good with the direct alsa output), but then it blocks the sound card, and besides, I like amarok better.

Aha . . . I downgraded my gstreamer to 0.8.3 and plugins to 0.8.2, and amarok's memory usage is now stable. Now I just need to fix my hard-drive buffer situation and life will be perfect.

Toojays wrote:

So I switched to gstreamer, and it seems like it should be better, except that it leaks memory.

Does anyone else notice this, or is it just me? Amarok was leaking pretty bad, so I tried like "gst-launch-0.8 filesrc location=/home/toojays/117_.mp3 ! mad ! alsasink", and that leaked . . . it also leaked playing Ogg Vorbis files. This is with gstreamer-0.8.5 and gst-plugins-0.8.3.

Dunno which amaroK version you were using, but the 1.1 series does not leak memory in gst-engine, and GStreamer itself doesn't leak either.

What you've been observing with your gst-launch pipeline was probably just the file being mmapped in the filesrc, which temporarily allocates buffer memory.

[/quote]
Dunno which amaroK version you were using, but the 1.1 series does not leak memory in gst-engine, and GStreamer itself doesn't leak either.

What you've been observing with your gst-launch pipeline was probably just the file being mmapped in the filesrc, which temporarily allocates buffer memory.[/quote]
Well I'm still using amarok 1.0.2, but with those other versions of the gst stuff, memory usage would increase as the music played, so that after playing an album, amarok was holding down a couple of hundred meg of ram! This is no longer occuring.