4.5.0 - segmentation faults?

[malspa]

old-polack, maybe I've been on the wrong track here.

I went back and set Xine as the backend.  Then I switched to standard track progression, but I still got a crash with a seg fault.  Then I went up to Settings > Replay Gain Mode and changed the setting from "Track" to "Off."

I had that setting set to "Off" under the mistaken impression (I think) that it had something to do with playing tracks in random order.

Then I went back down and changed the track progression back to "Random Tracks," which is the way I prefer things.

Now, I've gone through a few songs, in random order, and Amarok hasn't crashed!  I'll let it play for awhile and see what happens.

[Old-Polack]

old-polack, maybe I've been on the wrong track here.

I went back and set Xine as the backend.  Then I switched to standard track progression, but I still got a crash with a seg fault.  Then I went up to Settings > Replay Gain Mode and changed the setting from "Track" to "Off."

I had that setting set to "Off" under the mistaken impression (I think) that it had something to do with playing tracks in random order.

Then I went back down and changed the track progression back to "Random Tracks," which is the way I prefer things.

Now, I've gone through a few songs, in random order, and Amarok hasn't crashed!  I'll let it play for awhile and see what happens.

That would be this puppy, which has always been set this way.

[malspa]

Yeah.  And, drat, looks like I spoke too soon.  Crashed with a seg fault on about the fourth song.

Man, I'm about ready to give up.  I've been using Exaile, and it works fine.  Seems to be more light-weight, too.  It's only curiosity that keeps me going back and firing Amarok up.  That and the fact that some people like you are having no problems with Amarok.

[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.

Going back to this idea, I don't think that everyone who is NOT having a problem with Amarok has uninstalled everything having to do with pulse audio and gstreamer, right?  Seems to me that many folks are running Amarok fine "out of the box."

[Old-Polack]

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.

Going back to this idea, I don't think that everyone who is NOT having a problem with Amarok has uninstalled everything having to do with pulse audio and gstreamer, right?  Seems to me that many folks are running Amarok fine "out of the box."

I installed the OS, MiniMe, got rid of any Pulse and Gstreamer stuff because Pulse messed up with Skype, the first thing I installed after upgrading, and I hate Gstreamer. Then installed whatever else, pretty much leaving all the defaults. I installed Amarok and the Xine plugin for it, at the same time, and it's just been working from the start. That's as out of the box as it gets. I really didn't fuss with it at all. If someone claims a problem with it, I try to duplicate and verify the problem, but so far I haven't been able to, because it continues to work as expected.

My installation was from the first MiniMe 2010 image released, on the day of release, before it was later replaced. The install kernel caused me no end of grief, but upgrading to the 2.6.33 kernel cured all problems; currently using 2.6.33.7-pclos2, and have been upgrading continuously, as upgrades became available. I check for upgrades three times a day.

It's still randomly playing my selections, and hasn't missed a beat, or had a single hiccup.  

I'm switching back to the standard play through, as I've now heard some of these songs four or five times, while a few haven't played at all. 

[mikkl]

To confirm an earlier post, I am listening to Juk now and have used Amarok successfully in the past.  I simply find it a bit too heavy on the resources when I'm working in kmymoney.

When I first installed, I went to PCC-Hardware-Sound System and did confirm that I was running the ALSA subsystem and that the 'use Pulse' box was unchecked.

Could the segfaults be related to your sound card driver?  This system is also using the nvidia subsystem to OP and I should be using the same driver and neither of us have problems.

mikkl

[malspa]

Could the segfaults be related to your sound card driver?  This system is also using the nvidia subsystem to OP and I should be using the same driver and neither of us have problems.

Well, I'm running Amarok from KDE 4.5.1 in another distro on this same machine, but have never had any problems over there.  Maybe what I should do is compare Amarok's settings and everything on each distro and try to see what's different -- whenever I get around to it.

@ old-polack:  Yeah, you did start out differently with things than I did, since you started with MiniMe, removed the Pulse and Gstreamer stuff, and installed Amarok and Xine yourself.  I just installed PCLOS KDE 2010.07, pulled in any available updates, and at some point fired up Amarok.  About the only changes I made were to add songs to the collection, switch to random play, that sort of thing.  So, a bit more of an "out of the box" approach here, I guess.  I know almost nothing about stuff like Xine, backends, sound cards, etc.  My normal routine with a distro is to install the "main" version of the distro, then later simply fire up whatever music player is there, add songs to the collection, and start playing music.  That approach didn't work out here with Amarok and JuK, unfortunately.

[Old-Polack]

Could the segfaults be related to your sound card driver?  This system is also using the nvidia subsystem to OP and I should be using the same driver and neither of us have problems.

Well, I'm running Amarok from KDE 4.5.1 in another distro on this same machine, but have never had any problems over there.  Maybe what I should do is compare Amarok's settings and everything on each distro and try to see what's different -- whenever I get around to it.

@ old-polack:  Yeah, you did start out differently with things than I did, since you started with MiniMe, removed the Pulse and Gstreamer stuff, and installed Amarok and Xine yourself.  I just installed PCLOS KDE 2010.07, pulled in any available updates, and at some point fired up Amarok.  About the only changes I made were to add songs to the collection, switch to random play, that sort of thing.  So, a bit more of an "out of the box" approach here, I guess.  I know almost nothing about stuff like Xine, backends, sound cards, etc.  My normal routine with a distro is to install the "main" version of the distro, then later simply fire up whatever music player is there, add songs to the collection, and start playing music.  That approach didn't work out here with Amarok and JuK, unfortunately.

I also have a full KDE 2010.1 installation that has been fully upgraded. I removed Pulse and Gstreamer from it too. At this point the two installations are fairly equal, same players, and mostly all other apps are the same except I have no Compiz installed on MiniMe, but I don't use the Compiz on the full 2010 installation either. I probably should uninstall it, but haven't gotten around to that yet. Amarox works the same on that installation as it does on MiniMe.

On both installations, I have Amarok, Audacious, Clementine, Juk, KsCD, Mplayer, Smplayer, Xine, and Xmms that I can use for playing audio files or audio CDs. I prefer Xmms, even though it initially loads slow, as my default CD player, but all of these work well with my audio files. I tend to use Amarok the most for mp3s, and other sound files, but I also use sox through the play command from CLI if I just want to play a single file, of files from a single directory. Basically if it's meant to be able to play audio, it does, whichever app I chose. What I don't use, which everyone else seems to like, is VLC. I don't like it at all. I only have it installed for use with VLC help posts.

[Snapshot]

Today I tried every tool in my toolbox that I thought might change things but nothing worked.  I re-booted with MyLiveCD from July and Amarok works perfectly.  It booted right up and all is smooth.  Every track plays in succession with no glitches, hiccups or choppiness at all.  At some point this weekend I may reinstall MyLiveCD and update the install but I would do it just out of curiosity because I don't really depend on Amarok.  If it weren't for my curiosity and "desire" to get it working right I wouldn't consider it.  If I do I'll post the results.

[bshellenberg]

I just wanted to add something (related or not, someone might find it interesting). I have a minimal libxine player I whipped up based off the cxfe source found on the xine site. I stripped it down to "gas can" status. What I get is segfaults while playing pretty much anything wmv related. The segfault happens in libavcodec (ffmpeg package). If I set the audio driver to null, the videos will play fine. Setting the audio driver back to auto gives me the segfaults, which happen sometimes right away, other times after playing part or all of the video. Audio related obviously. I don't know if this is related or not, but should someone come here looking for solutions to issues with segfaults on some media files, libavcodec could be the culprit. Thought I'd throw this out there.

I myself, don't have the expertise to go into the ffmpeg package and debug the problem. I see there are numerous open bugs regarding demux of wmv/wma etc files in the ffmpeg bug tracker, but they are fairly old and I suspect they will go stale without anyone looking at them.

[Snapshot]

In July a Mandriva user posted a bug report here https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=60389 It appears that a patch is available to Mandy users gstreamer0.10-pulse 0.10.22-1.1.2 but Synaptic shows a newer version of this to be 0.10.23-1.  Could this be the cause of the problem where Amarok will only play one track without stuttering?  I realize that this is a little off topic but still selecting GStreamer backend in lieu of Xine does eliminate the seg fault.

[Snapshot]

This appears to be part of the answer if not the complete answer:     https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=188602 -------  Comment #9 From Dâniel Fraga  2009-04-08 08:41:50  -------

I'm closing it because the problem was with the xine library installation. I
reinstalled it from scratch and the problem has gone. Thank you.

Personally, I don't see how it solves our problem but it appears that a problem was found and fixed.  That leaves open the question where do we go from here?

[Old-Polack]

This appears to be part of the answer if not the complete answer:     https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=188602 -------  Comment #9 From Dâniel Fraga  2009-04-08 08:41:50  -------

I'm closing it because the problem was with the xine library installation. I
reinstalled it from scratch and the problem has gone. Thank you.

Personally, I don't see how it solves our problem but it appears that a problem was found and fixed.  That leaves open the question where do we go from here?

Maybe try what he did and first remove, then install Xine and the xine library as a fresh install. We all use the same libraries and binary files, in theory, but for various reasons sometimes the files don't install properly and get corrupted on a given machine. When the corruption is severe, the application doesn't work at all. If the corruption is only a byte or two, maybe only a single feature is affected.

Troubleshooting is often slow and tedious. Specific error messages lead one to try various approaches to the problem, and failure is a given. One fails until one succeeds, or gives up. One can fail 100 times before finding that one success, but one success is all you need. The fact that the application is working properly for some, but not for others brings up the possibility it's not the application that has the actual problem. Apparent problems with the application could be just a symptom of a real problem somewhere else. Then again, a single configuration setting in either the application or it's back end engine could be at fault.

[Snapshot]

@ old-polack Removing those files also removes Amarok, kde4-windeco-aurorae, and kdebase4-workspace. Do As Root, as well as two dozen other apps.  At this time it isn't worth it to me to re-install all of those.  In fact it would be simpler to just use MyLiveCD and re-install PCLOS.  Good suggestion but a lot of work for not enough gain as I don't depend on Amarok for mp3 playback.  While I don't mean to diminish your suggestion it simply isn't worth it at this time.

[malspa]

@ old-polack Removing those files also removes Amarok, kde4-windeco-aurorae, and kdebase4-workspace. Do As Root, as well as two dozen other apps.  At this time it isn't worth it to me to re-install all of those.  In fact it would be simpler to just use MyLiveCD and re-install PCLOS.  Good suggestion but a lot of work for not enough gain as I don't depend on Amarok for mp3 playback.  While I don't mean to diminish your suggestion it simply isn't worth it at this time.

I feel the same way.  I'm curious about why I'm having problems with Amarok, but I don't need Amarok.  (Pulled in today's updates, but they didn't help with Amarok's crashes.)

One of the cool things about this whole thing is that I found out that I like Exaile...