Amarok audio backend problems - UI freezes

[doktor5000]

I have upgraded my Packard Bell Easynote laptop to Mageia 2 from the DVD. I did an upgrade rather than a reinstall, but I removed everything in my home directory except the virtualbox settings.

Most things seem to be working fine, but Amarok is creating a problem. When using the xine back-end for the KDE sound system, it won't produce any sound. The progress slider moves, but there is no sound. Whether I try to play back ogg or mp3 files doesn't make a difference.

I don't think the issue is with xine itself because the system notification sounds work, and the same files play just fine in Kaffeine. The problem seems to be in the way that Amarok communicates with the back-end. phonon-xine and xine-pulse are installed.

I can work around the issue by using the vlc back-end for phonon instead. But I thought it would be good to get to the bottom of this issue. Can anyone help?

PS: Maybe Amarok itself is the issue, because I'm also noticing that it stops responding relatively often. When I use the vlc back-end, the music playback is uninterrupted but the interface is unresponsive for several seconds and the progress slider stands still.

[doktor5000]

Well the xine-backend is unmaintained upstream, and overall the vlc backend offers better, louder and more crisp sounds and is the way to go for the future.

[Gelsenbury]

Interesting! Thanks, I didn't know that. I'll give the vlc back-end a try then. Still, the problem remains ...

[aselluza]

Hi, I'm not using xine backend but gstreamer for KDE sound, amarok has no sound problem, but it's a constant headache itself. It's one of my favourite apps, I don't like Clementine so much, but amarok had never worked so horrible as in Mageia 2. I pisses me off almost everyday. I've tried to unselct all options that could make it slower, but no way. Almost everyday I must kill the application 3, 4, 5... times. Once it decides it won't work, yo can kill it and restart it one hundred times, it will freeze each one. It used to work pretty fine in Mageia 1, sometimes it was a bit slow because my music collection is pretty big, but nothing else. Now, it behaves really weird. Sometimes, every one, two, three... songs, it repeats the last one, but points to be playing a different one, so yo must stop it and play it again, but it will happen again and again (so it tells you it's playing a different song than the one it's really playing, I don't use the repeat mode). Really anoying. Some other times it's like a scratched record, repeating the same 2-3 seconds forever... But most of the times it just freeze forever and never come back, you can't do anything but killing it. It would be nice if something could be done about amarok to be a useful program again, because it became pretty useless, a daily headache. I work the whole morning on my notebook and I like doing it with music, as I used to do before...

[Gelsenbury]

With the VLC back-end, the sound from Amarok works well. But the interface still freezes, especially at the beginning of a session. A separate problem, definitely.

[aselluza]

With the VLC back-end, the sound from Amarok works well. But the interface still freezes, especially at the beginning of a session. A separate problem, definitely.

Yes, I gave up, I'm using Clementine, but I don't like it so much...

[doktor5000]

With the VLC back-end, the sound from Amarok works well. But the interface still freezes, especially at the beginning of a session. A separate problem, definitely.

What exactly do you mean by beginning of a session, you mean when you login, and amarok is automatically launched on startup?

[Gelsenbury]

It also happens when I restart Amarok. I just tried this, and it took 1 minute 50 seconds for the slider, timer and widgets to act as normal. It is typical for them to be stuck and unresponsive for a similarly long time.

Note that the music playback works immediately and smoothly, so I don't mind too much. But it makes an otherwise excellent application look less professional than it should.

(P.S.: Should we open a separate topic for this, or modify the title of this thread?)

[doktor5000]

(P.S.: Should we open a separate topic for this, or modify the title of this thread?)

I've done the latter as an exception, as the topics are too tightly knitted, even inside single posts.