Amarok Issues.

For a while I have been having a strange problem with Amarok. You could set up a playlist, let it play the first song and then wait upto five minutes before it moved to the next track.

Anyway, enough was enough tonight, (a guy needs Dave Grohl to run to!) I found this helpful little post on the Arch forums. Basically it is a known problem and if you switch to xine as your backend for phonon your good to go.

Arch KDE 4.3 GStreamer Issues.

It would seem I was not alone after launching Amarok only to hear.... nothing!! dooooh -><-

For some reason the switch to GStreamer as the prefered Phonon backend under 4.3 has caused some issues as discussed here.

As detailed in the above post the following should resolve most issues :

pacman -S gstreamer0.10-plugins

That will install all plugins required. However some people are switching to xine which also appears to rectify most problems.

KDE & Amarok Release's

Having been backed up with work and then being ill I have failed to note the following two important releases :

Amarok 2.1 is out and the release notes containing lots of info can be found here.

KDE 4.2.4, the fourth monthly maintenance release of KDE 4.2 has also been released and the full details can be read here. This releases code name is CornRow.

Amarok 2 Internet Streams.

As a music lover I should have by now poked around more in Amarok 2. I have until now only let it scan my modest collection and used it to play what it found.

However, sitting here tonight pondering a dodgy bit of Qt I was trying to write, I was looking for a distraction and found it in the various Internet based services that Amarok now hooks up to.

I am currently working my way through the Shoutcast service of Internet based radio stations. Based on the number of them I may be some time!