Hi all,
It is nice devs are updating the gstreamer engine, but the loss of crossfading is a major drawback (I\'m using amarok in a bar and can\'t loss crossfade)
I really hope it will be reenabled soon again.
In the meanwhile, I have put the old engine in the new amarok 1.3.1 and it works as fine as ever (at least with gstreamer 0.8.9)
I\'m going to describe how to do it here, to help anyone with the same issues

To do it on source:
Delete the amarok/src/engine/gst directory on 1.3.1 source tree
Copy the same directory from 1.3.0 source tree on 1.3.1 source tree
Edit the file amarok/src/engine/gst/amarok_gstengine_plugin.desktop and change the line X-KDE-amaroK-framework-version=9 to X-KDE-amaroK-framework-version=10
Rebuild, that\'s all.

To do it with binary rpms
Copy the file ...lib/kde3/libamarok_gstengine_plugin.so from 1.3.0 on a 1.3.1 installation or force install the amarok-gstreamer 1.3.0 rpm.
Edit ...share/services/amarok_gstengine_plugin.desktop as described before.
You are ready.

Why not just use xine?

Because it doesn\'t work ok. I takes a long time to start playing and leaves silence gaps, doesn\'t do crossfading (dmix is not an option, it has major issues on my machine), and some other stability problems.
The old gstreamer engine always worked fine, and I don\'t matter a 2% more CPU load, so why toss it when the new engine is not on par?

Yeah, and why the HECK would they drop ALSA output for GStreamer?

This is very frustrating as that combination is what I had settled on.

There must have been a good reason, can somebody enlighten me?

James wrote:

Yeah, and why the HECK would they drop ALSA output for GStreamer?

This is very frustrating as that combination is what I had settled on.

There must have been a good reason, can somebody enlighten me?

Fixed in SVN.

James wrote:

Yeah, and why the HECK would they drop ALSA output for GStreamer?

This is very frustrating as that combination is what I had settled on.

There must have been a good reason, can somebody enlighten me?

Because of rushing the new engine to have it in 1.3.1
There was issues hard to find in gstreamer and finally the alsa output was disabled in the release to avoid crashes
I think, and this is just a suggestion, that in such cases like this where a major component is changed, amarok could ship the new component without removing the old one (say for example amarok-gstreamer-new and amarok-gstreamer), this way the new part would receive the needed testing without breaking things.