Amarok starts, goes through setup wizard, then vanishes

vputz

I've just emerged Amarok for my amd64 system. It starts happily, gives me the "click on the folders holding your music" wizard, then quits... and never comes back.

ps ax shows me that "amarokapp" is still running. But it doesn't seem to do anything, no groovy icon appears in my kde bar, and in short I just don't know what to do here.

Any ideas?

erik258 · Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 9:45 pm Post subject:

have you tried running amarok from the command line to see if it outputs any useful errors?
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vputz · Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 9:53 pm Post subject:

Yep... and it didn't say anything, sadly.

However, after I'd forgotten it a while, it did come up. And then it would periodically pause... and come back. And then pause... and come back (no music playing or anything). I opened a konqueror window and mistakenly hit the amarok button.... pause... and come back. It eventually locked up the whole system pretty well, and when I did a ps ax it showed a LOT of amarokapp processes running! I did tell it that some of my music was in an empty directory mounted via samba from my NAS, but scanning that empty directory shouldn't have taken long.

Very very weird. Audio cd support isn't working in konqueror (I'm installing kdemultimedia-kioslaves; maybe that'll help). But I'm suspecting something funky in my kde. I've done an emerge --newuse and a revdep-rebuild and it all looks good... something weird must be going on.

Can Amarok rip CDs? In the small bit of time I had to play with it, I didn't see the option, and I can't think of a good ripper off the top of my head (I'd rather not emerge gnome stuff for sound-juicer). A good one-line bash script would be fine too, frankly (both for flac or vorbis).

sonicbhoc · Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 10:09 pm Post subject:

kaudiocreator is a good one in KDE. It hasn't given me much trouble and the config is simple. You might want to change where it rips to and what format it converts to on the first run though. My encoded file location box looks like this:

~/Music/%{albumartist}/%{albumtitle}/%{number} - %{title}.%{extension}
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vputz · Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 10:49 pm Post subject:

Good stuff! I'll check it out.

However, I currently have a more insidious problem; I can't seem to play audio CDs from within KDE. I keep getting "An error occurred while reading audiocd:/; Could not read /dev/cdrom".

I think there are issues with the /dev/cdrom link (should point to hda, and should have group permissions cdrom?). How do I get this working correctly?

vputz · Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 10:58 pm Post subject:

Think I got that sorted (problem was just that I was trying it on a CD it couldn't read).

Unfortunately, while I can view the CD through konqueror, any attempt to play it brings up amarok, which then locks everything up while it displays it's bleedin' logo in the middle of my screen and won't go away.

I feel certain amarok must be usable or it wouldn't be so popular. Any ideas on how to diagnose?

erik258 · Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 11:01 pm Post subject:

i believe that sounds right. are you in the cdrom group? if you add yourself to the group, don't forget to log out and back in (for X, or on a console if you're content to run all from that console until you re-login to X)

if the program is runnign as another user (ps -eaf should tell you which user it's runnig as), that user will have to be in the cdrom group.

whoever it is, they may also have to be in the audio group.

here's how it looks for me.

vputz · Posted: Fri Jan 05, 2007 4:49 am Post subject:

Yep, that worked. Got the CD working. Amarok itself is very wacky and I'm not sure what to do about it. Maybe there's a VFS problem somewhere that's making it lock up for large amounts of time? (seriously, things like I click a button, it pauses, the window manager even greys it out from lack of activity, and then suddenly 30 seconds later it does something).

syouth · Apprentice Joined: 18 Sep 2004 Posts: 275

Amarok doesn't print output to the console, because "debug" USE flag is usually not used. If you have problems later, try to emerge amarok with "debug" USE flag.
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