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Who else uses Amarok?

Thu Jul 30, 2009 3:34 pm

I've been using it as my music player on Linux for a few months now. I recently upgraded my home Linux box to Ubuntu 9.04, which in turn forced an upgrade of Amarok from 1.x to 2.x, because Ubuntu has dropped official support for the KDE 3.x runtime libraries (on which Amarok 1.x depends).

This promptly broke Amarok. It started up just fine... but when you hit Play, no sound would come out.

So I enabled the "backports" repository and installed an even later version of Amarok, and that seemed to fix the playback problem. But they've completely rearranged the user interface for no good reason, and they've removed the graphic EQ, which IMO was one of the features that set it apart from most of the other Linux music players. Not all of us can afford "perfect" headphones or speakers; a graphic EQ is very useful if you need to compensate for deficiencies in the frequency response of your headphones or speakers.

Meh. I guess I'll try it for a few days; if it pisses me off enough, I can always install Foobar2000 under wine. :roll:
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wt_JR
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Re: Who else uses Amarok?

Thu Jul 30, 2009 3:49 pm

To be honest, I've found rhythmbox suits all my needs.

I seem to remember some issues with gstreamer taking out whatever it is that Amarok uses, xine I think. Google-fu tells me that it's a fairly common/recent issue.

Gnome user myself, so I'm not really sure ;) Does sound play in other media players, such as Banshee?
 
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Re: Who else uses Amarok?

Thu Jul 30, 2009 3:54 pm

wt_JR wrote:
To be honest, I've found rhythmbox suits all my needs.

I seem to remember some issues with gstreamer taking out whatever it is that Amarok uses, xine I think. Google-fu tells me that it's a fairly common/recent issue.

Gnome user myself, so I'm not really sure ;) Does sound play in other media players, such as Banshee?

Yeah, other music players worked fine. The first half-dozen or so "fixes" I found via Google didn't work; the version bundled with Ubuntu 9.04 is apparently just plain broken.

Actually I am a Gnome user too; installing Amarok pulls in the KDE runtime as needed. This is less ugly than it sounds; the only practical downside of running Amarok under Gnome is that Amarok takes a little longer to start, since it needs to load the KDE libraries before it can get down to business.
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titan
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Re: Who else uses Amarok?

Fri Jul 31, 2009 6:19 am

I remember Amarok from a long time ago before it had required KDE. I liked it.

I use Audacious now. I have a few gripes with it, but nothing that's deal breaking. Audacious is not in the same class as Amarok, though.
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crabjokeman
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Re: Who else uses Amarok?

Sat Nov 07, 2009 5:10 pm

Amarok2 uses Phonon, which is a thin wrapper to other sound API's. You can try both the xine and gstreamer backends to see what suits you better (if you have the appropriate packages installed).You can configure Phonon with:
qtconfig
 
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Re: Who else uses Amarok?

Sat Nov 07, 2009 6:10 pm

With my recent upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10, I've switched to Audacious. Stability could be better, but it has a reasonable UI and a working equalizer. It seems to be the most stable if I use the PulseAudio output plugin; however gapless playback only works properly if I select the ESD output plugin. :roll:

(But given that Amarok apparently has neither an EQ nor gapless output, I still come out ahead...)
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