On 12/01/2012 08:50 PM, Modestas Vainius wrote:
So wheezy is stuck with some unofficial snapshot which does not seem to be so bad though as far as lacko of bug reports tell. Anyway, my mistake, sorry about that.
Amarok works well in Debian Wheezy here. I've been using it everyday for months. There's only one thing that's causing a bit of problems and that's the gstreamer phonon backend with pulseaudio. When you have the gstreamer phonon backend with pulseaudio, sometimes Amarok (gstreamer?) will fail to play the next track if the next track is a different file type (ie: going from OGG to FLAC). It doesn't happen 100% of the time, but it often doesn't play the first 10 seconds or so of the next track or doesn't play it at all and Amarok just stops playback right in the middle of the playlist (I think, because Amarok realizes it's getting out of sync with the backend).
I've contacted the Amarok devs and since it plays just fine with the VLC Phonon Backend, they say it's a gstreamer pulseaudio problem.
I've downgraded my gstreamer libs to the gstreamer libs in Squeeze and that seems to fix the problem of Amarok stopping playback in the middle of the playlist on file type change, but it doesn't fix the problem of the first few seconds of the next audio clip getting cut off if it's a different filetype (perhaps from starting playback before it's actually buffered sufficiently?). It appears that gstreamer requires a different library to process the next file and maybe it just needs more time before it's ready for playback and the phonon-gstreamer backend just isn't registering that and then getting out of sync with gstreamer (Amarok says it's on 0:10 but gstreamer hasn't even started to play yet!). So I want to say it seems like a phonon problem.
Keep in mind, this is not an Amarok exclusive problem either.. This is a phonon-backend + gstreamer + pulseaudio problem and any applications (Amarok, Bangarang, etc.) that use this phonon-backend + gstreamer + pulseaudio exhibit the exact same problems in Wheezy...
To be honest, I have no idea how to even start reporting this as somebody has already reported this as a bug in Amarok but upstream says it isn't and I've also proven myself that it isn't exclusive to Amarok and seems to be a problem with gstreamer or the way phonon interacts with gstreamer when pulseaudio is used.. I've tried running amarok with full gstreamer debugging but that didn't put out anything that was useful at all.. The usually debug controls for gstreamer (logging function calls in gstreamer) doesn't seem to be working in conjunction with the gstreamer phonon backend.. So I really don't know what to do or where to go from there so I pretty much gave up on it and started working on something else.
Other than the above, and a graphical visualizer feature that is unnecessarily disabled by upstream for older graphics cards, Amarok in Wheezy has been 100% perfect from my extensive usage and testing.
Oh, and some Debian users keep trying to use the phonon-vlc-backend without running a UTF-8 locale which is a very big no-no as non-UTF8 locales are NOT compatible with VLC. This makes then not compatible with the phonon-backend-vlc when used with Amarok. I don't know if it's possible to enforce a package dependency on a UTF-8 locale, but it would be good idea for anything that uses VLC, if you could! I believe the Debian installer has used UTF-8 locales by default for many years now, but some users running installs from ages ago may have never upgraded their locale to UTF-8. Any filenames that have special characters won't play in VLC if locale is not UTF-8.
Cheers, -David