Amarok is skipping the first few seconds of each track. I have tried what I can in the playback settings, but to no avail. Plaese help. Thanks.......

Provide more information. Distro, version, etc

Hi,

I had the same problem on a Mandriva 2009 with Amarok 1.4.10 but only on some MP3s.
When playing these MP3s the visualizer would react but there would be no sound for the first 2 seconds or so.

I "fixed" the problem by switching from ALSA to OSS as an output module.

Replying to my own message here, a reboot later I had no sound at all.
So the correct steps for this problem on a Mandriva 2009 is to install the package kde3-amarok-engine-yauap and then to select OSS as an output module. A strange thing is that the selected sound engine must remains XINE, selecting yauap does not work.

I have a similar issue with 1.4.10 on Debian sid w/KDE 4.2 and ALSA. It only seems to happen to flac files - if you start a track by double clicking it, it's fine, and you can seek back to the start of a track after Amarok has skipped ahead, but when a track ends and Amarok transitions to the next (flac)track in the playlist, it skips anywhere from 1 or 2 to 15 seconds into the track and starts playing from there. It goes without saying that this is not desirable behaviour.

Normally my playback settings are: no crossfading (insert 0ms gap), no fadeout, fadeout on exit, resume playback on start. I tried disabling fadeout on exit to no avail. Neither useful was using OSS, increasing the (no crossfading)gap to 2000ms, nor disabling fadeout on exit. What did seem to work was enabling crossfading, with the lowest duration (400ms - probably the duration is irrelevant to this solution though) and setting the mode to "on manual track change only". Since I don't want any crossfading I can live with that, but it's curious that just setting no crossfading doesn't work properly as this does.

I have the very same problem with wma and also some flac files. I'm running gentoo 2.6.28, alsa 1.0.18, kde 4.2.2 and amarok 2.0.90. It has happened also with 2.0.1 and 2.0.2 and is always reproducible. Maybe a problem with xine backend?...

To better explain, when the track reaches the end, the progress bar on the top statrts to show false time remaining (usually approximately plus 3 minutes of track time) and then it skips first few seconds of next track.
screens here:
http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/2421/amarok.png
http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/9339/amarok1.png
http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/4180/amarok2.png

Have tried to turn off fade-out effect, no results..

Same here on Gentoo with kde 4.2 and alsa along with xine as the phonon backend.

Is it possible it's an issue like that? I tried it out in juk and got the exact same problem. would it be unwise to try the gstreamer backend in phonon as well?

this is a strange one. arch64 latest (without testing repo), amarok 1.4.10, kde-kdemod 4.2.2, ALSA output (1.0.20), crossfade on manual track change enabled (1000ms) . I have a feeling this is related after reading some of the posts here

i have a crossfade on manual track change, so this might have made it worse, but when I was hitting the skip button on one of my flac albums, it retained its time through 2-3 song changes, as in, i'd skip from one song at 1:33 and it'd go to the next, starting at 1:33 and continuing where the other song left off, on the next song.. It reminded me of an 8 track. After it stopped doing that, it skipped to 23 seconds on the first track that wasn't following the time of the previous track, and from there, 13 seconds. I was laughing when I was doing it cuz I was high, but I figured I'd tell you what happened since it might help to isolate where the problem is coming from.

My guess is Xine. Xine definitely has some issues, and this one sounds very xine related..

EDIT: sqlite database, 14,377 tracks, only the flacs seem to have this issue

Same here, but it doesn't happen every time (something like 9 times out of 10). It happens with every amarok version i've used.

I too have this problem. It happens with FLAC files (haven't tried other formats) only when the tracks are changing (not when I press "play" or the track is the first one). The next song, when skipping, will start playing at around 30 seconds into the song.

The version's 1.4.10p20090130. Distro's gentoo and I've selected gapless playback (crossfading in 0 ms). The audio output engine is xine that uses ALSA. There aren't other engines to try out.

Edit: I should point out that the skipping is semi-random, ie. amarok never skips with majority of my albums but there are few albums where it might skip. But even then, not always.

I have a similar problem as well on Arch_x86, amarok 2.0.96, kde-kdemod 4.2.3,  no crossfade. 

The problem I have is as follows:  When I manually select a flac file on my playlist amarok will start playing the track anywhere from 1/2 second to 15 seconds into the track.  Strangely enough it appears to be related to the track, as a specific track will always start playing about 10 seconds in each time I select it, and a different track in the same album will only start a half second into the track. 


This problem does not occur when amarok changes tracks on its own (from song to song), nor does it occur with .ape or mp3.

Fix (sort of).  I was using OSS Output before reading this tread.  I then changed my output to ALSA (1.0.18a) which has mostly fixed the problem.  Now most of the tracks play fine, and the tracks that would skip 10-20 seconds into the song, now only lose about a half second. 

I have the same problem too, and am also running Gentoo (hmm..I'm seeing a trend here..)

Mine skips the first 40-50 seconds or so on a track change about 75% of the time.  I'm using a mostly 'stable' Gentoo setup with x86_64, amarok-1.4.10something, in-kernel ALSA (2.6.29 kernel), and a Cmedia 8788 soundcard (snd_oxygen)

Maybe something is wrong with Gentoo's xine-lib?  There's only one version available right now.

What do you think? Is this something the amarok devs need to work on or should we try filing a bug with Gentoo?

Oh, this is with flac files too, although all of my files are in flac format.

edit: Apparently Arch Linux users are having problems with flac and xine-lib as well, so it may not Gentoo specific: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/13185

Amarok's flac playback is so sketchy that I'm going to have to switch to aqualung for the time being.  I hope this gets fixed soon...

dusty_fox wrote:What do you think? Is this something the amarok devs need to work on or should we try filing a bug with Gentoo?

Oh, this is with flac files too, although all of my files are in flac format.

edit: Apparently Arch Linux users are having problems with flac and xine-lib as well, so it may not Gentoo specific: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/13185

I can't reproduce any of these problems in Kubuntu with Amarok 2.1-SVN, so I think you should file a bug to Gentoo and Arch as it really seems to be distribution related.

FYI: Amarok doesn't handle sound itself, it uses Phonon to do so, so if something in the sound doesn't work, have a look at the underlying tools...

It's a problem with xine-lib, at least in Gentoo.

Removing /usr/lib/xine/plugins/1.26/xineplug_decode_ff.so seems to be a temporary fix for the problem, at least until we get a new xine-lib version.  You probably need flac installed also if it isn't already.