1. I need a player to be able to access songs within a single flac file w/embedded cuesheet, the flac file should just look like a directory containing the albums songs. If I were to play the entire album flac each song needs to be reported to last.fm as it's played.

2. Stability. I'm running Debian Unstable and to be fair right now xmms won't even come up (this is unusual) but probably 70% of the time Amarok will not go past the splash screen. My opinion is the KDE4 version will probably be a lot better in this regard.

From what I've gathered the only real solution for me is the Squeezebox, although I'm hoping Amarok is not that far behind.

Okay then,

Thanks for stopping in just to post this, continue on your way!

Thanks for the answer Dan. I guess I was wrong in hoping these were possibly things that could be incorporated/fixed in an upcoming version of Amarok. I will follow your advice and move on.

I don't use shavers on my legs for the same reason. thanks for posting.

edit: nearly forgot... Just had to take this out of context "2. Stability. I'm running Debian Unstable..." Thanks for the giggle.

dangle_wtf wrote:edit: nearly forgot... Just had to take this out of context "2. Stability. I'm running Debian Unstable..." Thanks for the giggle.

No Problem. Glad I could amuse you. Guess it's only fair that we trade giggles. I saw you were on maternity leave and instantly the movie Idiocracy popped in my mind.

Be honest, it was the president's kids you thought of, right?

I honestly don't know what you're complaining about stability wise, i'm running Debian Unstable on two machines now and amarok works perfectly on both of them.

The FLAC thing I agree with yeah, perhaps that will be incorporated in time.

This FLAC thing; is that the same as not being able to fast forward them because I'm getting really annoyed with having to listen to a whole song when the only good bit is at the end and when I try and dray the progress bar forwards the sound cuts out (but the analyser continues as if it is still playing) then a few seconds later it comes back on as if nothing had happened.

I checked to see if VLC player could fast forward FLACs and it could so Amarok - catch up please!

(This is however my only complaint and Amarok is still obviously the best music player (and probably program in general) that there ever was, is and will be) 

The FLAC thingy may take time to implement, i don't know. If you like the other features of amarok, you could temporarily split the one-file albums. I don't like the FLACs with cuesheet because it's very hard to listen just one song at a time (say, with a command-line client or if you want to transfer it to your portable media device) but Amarok is opensource and you can help. Caring about stability? don't use Debian Unstable. I have the latest packages of Arch Linux and the latest checkout i made of Amarok-SVN, and the player was fired up like three weeks ago, when i had to reboot the computer to apply a kernel update. Besides this, i dont have an unstable system. Thanks for sharing your thoughts by the way.

To fix seeking in FLAC files, use "metaflac --add-seekpoint=10s" on each file. You can find more information here:

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=129405

Thanks to everyone for the responses. Amarok is running again on my machine. Amarok and X are the only "mainstream", out of beta, non-Java programs I can remember ever had serious "stability" problems with. Debian Unstable is a lot like calling the 350lb guy tiny. I've been running Linux for my desktop about 9 years now and Debian for 5; I'm quite content. Debian Unstable's Amarok is certainly more stable than a random SVN checkout.

I have not directly run into the issue with not being able to fast forward flac's, but it explains the issue with the song name change being several seconds off. With XMMS/mp3cue on the same flac file the song change is dead on. Anyway I'll keep that info in mind, thanks.

Unless someone wants to buy me an additional TB of storage for my ZFS server, I'm not about to duplicate my flac files. I'm certainly not going to replace my existing one file CD images. For someone with a handful of flac image files that could be a great option however.