Amarok was working fine on my system until recently.

There is now no sound backend shown (amarok / settings / configure amarok / playback / configure phonon / backend) although the gstreamer and vlc backend packages are still installed. I suspect that some recent system updates has caused the problem.

Is it just me?

Thanks

It does not work in Neon at least, possibly Kubuntu 18.04 as well. My guess is that it is due to Amarok being KDE 4 (and Qt 4), and the Ubuntu 18.04 package that is available may be too old for our Plasma. Basically, bit rot may be setting in. I think being KDE 4, it needs KDE 4 specific systems, and newer Plasma things probably broke whatever compatibility with the long-unsupported KDE 4/Qt 4 that was left.

Qt4 phonon support was removed in the latest Phonon version, which is now in Neon. Only Qt5 support remains.

Thanks very much for posting.

Rolling back the package phonon-backend-vlc to the previous version re-stored sound to amarok. Perhaps time to move to clementine though.

If You like Clementine, take a look at Strawberry. It's based on Clementine as you will see after install, but seems to be more actively developed. Works great on my system.
https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/

Thanks I will give Strawberry a go too.

Hi, I'm here for the same problem.
Thanks you for the advice about Strawberry, I never heard of it and it looks interesting

Another promising player is Elisa, it is even probably available in your distro repository:
https://community.kde.org/Elisa
But for now I'm using Clementine because with Elisa I cannot make it see the music I have on a NFS network share .

I will follow this thread for any positive developments.

I have the same problem with Amarok in KDE Neon 5.17.2, however it looks like Amarok are working on the qt5 update. In the meantime another music player to try is Pragha, it's a light weight music player written in C. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles as does Amarok however I installed it from the repositories and it worked with the absolute minimum of fuss. The only thing I had to do was point it to where my music is so it could index the collection. https://pragha-music-player.github.io/

Today I tried AmaroK again but got stuck at this backed problem: even after finally managing to see VLC as backend, I couldn't get any sound.
I've tried so many audio/music players (amarok, rhythmbox, banshee...) over the years, and I think at the moment Elisa and Clementine are on top of the list, although "resume playback after start" feature recently stopped working on both.
So when I have to restart the computer or log out and back in while listening to my playlist (with music player included in autostart apps) they don't automatically resume playback any longer - without clicking on the play button (perhaps a recent update in one of the library files caused this).

sadi wrote:[...] although "resume playback after start" feature recently stopped working on both.
So when I have to restart the computer or log out and back in while listening to my playlist (with music player included in autostart apps) they don't automatically resume playback any longer - without clicking on the play button (perhaps a recent update in one of the library files caused this).

I noticed the same problem in all the amarok forks.
I tried to workaround the bug launching the application with:

Code: Select all

clementine --play

but it does not work, maybe the problem is related.

For newest strawberry you can also use as repository: https://apt.iteas.at

Have fun!

Elisa is back and resumes playback after start - to my surprise, I've discovered that uninstalling VLC Media Player together with all its dependencies broke Elisa (which should have listed them as its dependencies also and not allow them to go...

I also really liked amarok. I remembered not to upgrade the package that caused it to break through a couple of updates, but then forgot. So I went to find another music player. Tried several that others recommended including Clementine, Elisa, Strawberry, and DeaDBeef. VLC is a fallback, but it doesn't have any organization features. I settled on Strawberry. I'm not sure what I didn't like about Clementine, as I see now that it is very similar to Strawberry (not surprising since it is a fork of Clementine), but Strawberry shows a bigger image of the album cover of the song playing, which is probably why. DeaDBeef was just too primitive. Elisa has a problem where it shows the wrong album covers for the tracks, at least when it loaded all of the music I have that it found. I should file a bug report, but I wanted to play with it some more to see I could figure out some more details on what/why it is doing wrong instead of just reporting "shows wrong album covers."