I just compiled amaroK on my Fedora Core 2 system and played with it for five minutes. Here are the problems I have with it:

[ul]
[*]amaroK crashed about 10 times in the five minutes I used it.
[*]amaroK doesn't provide the user with appropriate feedback. When I use the gstreamer backend and try to play my playlist it just attempts (and fails) to play each tune. It basically rushes through the playlist until it reaches the last entry and then stops. It never tells me what the problem is (e.g. cannot open device) which makes it impossible to find out whats wrong.
[*]When I tried switching to the xine engine amaroK refused to do so with an error dialog. Only after I changed the output plugin from "alsasink" to "afsink" was I able to switch to the xine engine. Why do I have to change the sink when I want to switch to another engine anyway?
[*]I clicked on the vu-meter in the player window several times to see the different visualization options but after a few clicks amaroK crashed with an error that it hat problems dealing with the GL libs. I don't even *want* GL visualization and amaroK certainly shouldn't crash as a result.
[*]Trying to play an internet stream sometimes crashes amaroK, sometimes doesn't...but audio doesn't work anyway (the stream info is shown in the OSD though)
[*]The preferences don't get stored when I click "Apply" or "Ok", only when I quit amaroK. This was a real pain in the **** since amaroK crashed so often and everytime I restarted it I had to change the preferences...again.
[/ul]

AmaroK, in theory, *could* blow every other player out of the water. Unfortunately I cannot use it because of it's many problems which is really frustrating. Right now it feels like a pre-alpha application, certainly not like a 1.1 version.

most of these issues are obviously problems with your specific configuration/system, not amarok itself. so dont be too quick to diss it that way! make sure you have gstreamer installed correctly and if you run it from the command line you should get a little more output on whats going wrong..

I completely agree the gst engine needs more visual feedback.

I can address the issue with having to setup one engine when you are trying to load another

The GL issue you report is probably a Qt issue with GL on your system. If you didn't want GL you could have disabled it at the configure stage, but I spose you didn't run configure --help to check.

Which engine crashed on playing streams?

Thanks for the feedback.

If I just wanted to diss AmaroK I certainly wouldn't say that I could blow every other player out of the water or spend my time on a lengthy posting trying to provide feedback so things can be fixed. :laugh:

Here are some details about the engine problems:

gstreamer+alsasink:
When I hit the play button the player immediately stops again. I hear no audio whatsoever.

gstreamer+osssink:
When I hit the play button the play button starts flahing, the pause and stop buttons become un-ghosted and the song info is displayed in the OSD but I hear no audio, the analyzer plays its idle animation and the seekbar slider doesn't move. Pressing the stop button does nothing.

xine:
Playback works as it should.

The GL problem (obviously) disappears when I don't compile in GL so that is no longer a problem for me.

During further testing AmaroK crashed once when using the gstreamer engine and trying to play a local mp3 so that seems to be a gstreamer problem. AmaroK always crashes when I try to playback a shoutcast stream though even when I use the xine engine so that appears to be a seperate problem.

The engine switch problem is only a serious problem if you don't know about it (but then it's quite serious) but the fact that AmaroK loses it's configuration on a crash is quite annoying since I'm used to the fact that every other app stores its config when you hit Apply/Ok. Gnome apps don't even have Apply/Ok buttons anymore since the config is stored as soon as a change is made.

I don't get any useful feedback on the console when AmaroK crashes, only "KCrash: Application 'amarok' crashing...".

Packages: I'm using the current gstreamer packages for fedora core 2 found on freshrpms and stock fc2 qt 3.3.3 and kde 3.2.2 rpms and have compiled AmaroK with gcc 3.3.3

If you need any more feedback I'm more than happy to provide it.

good point! sorry didnt mean it in a bad way. its just it not just could blow every other player out of the water, it does! if it works properly hope you get it sorted

I had some problems with amarok crashing on non-stream audio. The problem was cause by the instalation. Some files where not installed where they were supposed to and this made the application crash. I can recall what files created the problems, but basically if was of the form:

KDE was using .../usr/share/kde/xxxx and amarok had installed it's files in
.../usr/share/xxxx , where xxxx is apps, config, etc. I think there is a problem in the configure script and the way it decides where to install the files.

I don't know if this is your problem, and it's definitelly not the GL problem, but maybe you can check it out.

Nacho

Thanks for the pointer. AmaroK installs its files in /usr/share which is correct for FC2 so that doesn't seem to be the reason. I did an "strace amarokapp" and got an interesting result when amarok crashes. I get 1024 lines of these:

close(X) = -1 EBADF (Bad file descriptor)

where X goes all the way up from 1 to 1023. Then AmaroK crashes. On X<30 I get a result of "0" (=ok) but closing all descriptors above that return "-1".
Looks like AmaroK does something seriously weird here.

Hm, the above happens when I use the xine engine and try to play a shoutcast stream. When I use the gstreamer engine AmaroK doesn't crash but the audio doesn't play either.
Is there a sensible way to get debug output out of AmaroK? (the output on the console isn't sufficient and the strace output contains way too much noise)

When I do
[code:1]gst-launch filesrc location=downloads/music/01_-_yatsuo_motoki_-_elements2_-_dub_element.mp3 ! mad ! alsasink[/code:1]
on the commandline the audio plays after a 3 second delay so it seems my gstreamer setup should work.