4.5.0 - segmentation faults?

[malspa]

I believe that the problem lies in Phonon.  After installing GStreamer and resetting my sound preferences from Xine to GStreamer, Amarok works just fine.  But remember to change this setting in all user accounts.

Thanks!  Well, I went to Synaptic and installed phonon-gstreamer (4.4.2-1pclos2010).  This brought in gstreamer0.10-pulse (0.10.23-1pclos2010) and pulseaudio (0.9.21-5pclos2010).  Then, did the following:

Settings > Configure Amarok... > Playback > Configure Phonon > Backend tab > select GStreamer > use the "Prefer" button to move it above Xine on the list

After playing a couple of songs, the sound became real choppy.  Rebooted the computer and started Amarok again.  The first song played fine, then after that the sound becomes choppy again.

Did I miss something here?

[Snapshot]

Oops!    I didn't follow through and now see your problem. Let me experiment with it and post back.

[Snapshot]

I assumed (wrongly) that all was well since I got Amarok running again.  Now I see what you encountered after the first track.  Since I'm no expert on Amarok I'm not certain how to fix the problem but I'll work on it.  In the meantime if someone else has an answer then speak up.

Bob

[malspa]

Well, thanks, though.  It does seem to take care of the problem of Amarok crashing!

[Snapshot]

I really thought I found the solution to a problem that many folks seem to have and i did find a partial solution.  After removing all of the phonon plug-ins and installing only the minimum packages I could get away with I tried Amarok and nothing worked until I installed the complete package including the Phonon GStreamer plugin.  After that I opened Amarok again and the first file played just fine yet subsequent files were choppy.  I'm now using VLC and each subsequent file works perfectly.  Right now I don't know what the solution is but I'll keep trying and hoping I can find a way to correct the problem.  Although I'm disappointed I'm not giving up.

[Old-Polack]

I can only speak about my installations, but I uninstalled everything I could that had to do with pulse audio, and gstreamer. Xine has always had the much better engine, so is what I use with Amarok. My Amarok plays any amount of tunes I put on the play list, and never has any choppy playback. This is on a 2002 Compaq with an AMD 2100* CPU and on board nforce2 sound chip. Pretty low spec machine from what I'm used to.

[Snapshot]

The crash issue is addressed here https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=233557 but that was several months ago.  It does appear that there is/was a problem in Xine which was to be fixed upstream.  I would have thought or hoped that KDE would have fixed it by now but apparently not.  I had not used Amarok for awhile before today and didn't realize that a problem existed.  Everything I have tried under Xine failed and the only way Amarok will play is with Phonon-GStreamer and I can only play single file play lists without it chopping the next track.  If I quit Amarok and run it again I can play another track but this is a terrible way to play tracks.  I wanted to use Amarok for capturing Last.FM streams and then discovered the problem.

[Old-Polack]

The crash issue is addressed here https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=233557 but that was several months ago.  It does appear that there is/was a problem in Xine which was to be fixed upstream.  I would have thought or hoped that KDE would have fixed it by now but apparently not.  I had not used Amarok for awhile before today and didn't realize that a problem existed.  Everything I have tried under Xine failed and the only way Amarok will play is with Phonon-GStreamer and I can only play single file play lists without it chopping the next track.  If I quit Amarok and run it again I can play another track but this is a terrible way to play tracks.  I wanted to use Amarok for capturing Last.FM streams and then discovered the problem.

I'm updated through today, have never had a problem with Amarok and the Xine engine, and have a fairly long play list of which I'm about a third of the way through at the moment. I couldn't ask for better performance than what I'm getting now and always have gotten.  

[malspa]

I'm updated through today, have never had a problem with Amerok and the Xine engine, and have a fairly long play list of which I'm about a third of the way through at the moment. I couldn't ask for better performance than what I'm getting now and always have gotten. 

Yeah, some people are having these problems and some people aren't.  Makes it kinda hard to figure out what's going on.

And I don't think it's a KDE4 issue because Amarok plays fine here in another distro where I also have KDE 4.5.1 installed.

Looking at the bottom right of your 2nd screen shot, I see you are using the "Standard" track progression.  Does it make any difference if you use "Random Tracks" instead?  That's what I've been trying to use here.

[Snapshot]

I followed your lead and uninstalled everything I could related to GStreamer and Phonon then tried again using Xine.  Once again complete failure.  Amarok crashed before booting and I got the segmentation fault error again.  If I felt strongly enough or was desperate enough to have to use Amarok I could always re-install PCLOS from MyLiveCD but that's a lot of trouble for something I don't depend on or have to have at the moment.  Tomorrow if I have time I may boot from MyLiveCD and try Amarok from it.  Otherwise I'll probably wait on the KDE team to fix the problem.  This is a random issue in that some users are experiencing it while others aren't.  If I discover a fix I'll post it.  Off to bed now. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

[Old-Polack]

I followed your lead and uninstalled everything I could related to GStreamer and Phonon then tried again using Xine.  Once again complete failure.  Amarok crashed before booting and I got the segmentation fault error again.  If I felt strongly enough or was desperate enough to have to use Amarok I could always re-install PCLOS from MyLiveCD but that's a lot of trouble for something I don't depend on or have to have at the moment.  Tomorrow if I have time I may boot from MyLiveCD and try Amarok from it.  Otherwise I'll probably wait on the KDE team to fix the problem.  This is a random issue in that some users are experiencing it while others aren't.  If I discover a fix I'll post it.  Off to bed now. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

It's not Phonon I uninstalled. It's Pulse Audio and GStreamer that I removed.

[malspa]

I uninstalled everything I could that had to do with pulse audio, and gstreamer.

Seems like something that's worth trying, but, wow, uninstalling that stuff shouldn't be something that one has to do to get Amarok working right.

[Old-Polack]

I'm updated through today, have never had a problem with Amerok and the Xine engine, and have a fairly long play list of which I'm about a third of the way through at the moment. I couldn't ask for better performance than what I'm getting now and always have gotten. 

Yeah, some people are having these problems and some people aren't.  Makes it kinda hard to figure out what's going on.

And I don't think it's a KDE4 issue because Amarok plays fine here in another distro where I also have KDE 4.5.1 installed.

Looking at the bottom right of your 2nd screen shot, I see you are using the "Standard" track progression.  Does it make any difference if you use "Random Tracks" instead?  That's what I've been trying to use here.

Not sure what you mean by "Random Tracks", is there a setting for that, because I'm not seeing one? I just opened a bunch of directories and clicked the individual song files I felt like listening to.

[malspa]

Not sure what you mean by "Random Tracks", is there a setting for that, because I'm not seeing one? I just opened a bunch of directories and clicked the individual song files I felt like listening to.

Yes, at the bottom right corner of the Amarok window, there's a row of icons.  Hovering over the last icon to the right, you'll get a pop-up that says "Track Progression."  If you click on that icon, you can change the track progression to "Random Tracks."

[Old-Polack]

Not sure what you mean by "Random Tracks", is there a setting for that, because I'm not seeing one? I just opened a bunch of directories and clicked the individual song files I felt like listening to.

Yes, at the bottom right corner of the Amarok window, there's a row of icons.  Hovering over the last icon to the right, you'll get a pop-up that says "Track Progression."  If you click on that icon, you can change the track progression to "Random Tracks."

Thank you. I was looking in the menu bar, and not seeing anything.

OK, did that. Is there anything else I should do now, or will it just start jumping around the tracks?

Edit:

Never mind, it's just jumping around the tracks on the play list in random fashion. It doesn't affect the quality of playback in the least; it's still excellent.