amaroK is broken beyond belief [SOLVED]

widremann · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2005 Posts: 1314

I just emerged amarok today. I haven't had it installed on my system previously. There's no leftover config files, nothing. When I first load it up, it goes through the wizard just fine. But when it finally starts, it will never actually build my collection. I try various times to force it to do so. But it never does. Then it crashes. After that, I try starting it again, but it just crashes on startup. No messages on the console, nothing. I downgrade to 1.3.6. Same thing. I clean out the relevant entries in .kde/share/apps and .kde/share/config. I go through the wizard again; same crap. So I try upgrading to the 1.4 beta version. I got pretty much the same results, but it definitely won't play anything either, even if I don't load the collection. And then after restarting it two or so times, now it just crashes on startup.

Can somebody tell me how to fix this, or, more importantly, why it is so horribly broken out of the box? I can't even get it to play a file, much less actually do something more useful. Now it just crashes every time. I could clean out .kde/share/apps and friends, but it just ends up doing the same thing again after a while. How can I make amaroK work?

benzoate · n00b Joined: 24 Jan 2005 Posts: 5

I was having the same problem with amarok. I upgraded to amarok 1.3.8, it is masked, but I have found it to be more stable then 1.3.6.

mointrigue · Posted: Wed Mar 08, 2006 5:20 am Post subject:

1.3.8 is definately the way to go on any distro. Also, make sure to compile it with the xine USE flag so that you can use the amarok xine engine. I've been using amarok for quite a while now, and I found the other engines highly unstable leading to crashes (especially arts). Xine is by far the most stable and if you do have any initial configuration difficulties it provides the most helpful error messages.

Valheru · Posted: Wed Mar 08, 2006 9:08 am Post subject:

amarok isn't actually broken. This problem is caused when you installed the taglib ebuild with a different version of GCC than amarok. Re-emerge taglib and the problems will go away.

See this thread for details :

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-379264-postdays-0-postorder-asc-highlight-amarok+taglib-start-25.html

Tlaloc · Posted: Wed Mar 08, 2006 10:58 am Post subject:

amarok 1.4beta1/2 shouldn't crash anymore when there are problems with the collection scanner, they made some changes to avoid those nasty startup-crashs in pre 1.4 versions. Anyway, if that happens there should be log in .kde/share/apps/amarok that tells at which file it crashed. If the problem isn't related to taglib then most probably to the sound engine you are using is causing it or it les even deeper in the (sound?)system. 1.4beta1/2 run very solid for me.
Ah, where do you have your collection stored? Locally, NFS, samba etc..?

Bye, Val.

widremann · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2005 Posts: 1314

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm going to give them a try this morning and hopefully it'll fix my issues.

EDIT: In fact, recompiling Taglib completely fixed all my issues. Thank you very much for mentioning that because I never would have discovered that on my own.