Why I can't use Amarok

[Mathias Panzenböck]

On 08/28/2011 09:58 AM, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I was a happy user of Amarok 1.4.x, but since Amarok 2.x, I've been getting a
> lot of compatibility problems with it, which made it use painful. As a result,
> I've been mostly using the VLC player recently, which isn't perfect, but is
> less quirky.
>
> What I need from Amarok is to have a Phonon backend that will:
>
> 1. Play all files I throw at it
> - .mp3, .ogg, .flv, .mp4, .mod/.s3m/.xm/.it, .avi, etc. Phonon-gstreamer is
>    unable to play .mp4 files due to this bug -
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=267319 - and
> Phonon-VLC was much more quirky in this respect last time I tried.

The tracker file types .mod/.s3m/.xm/.it are actually supported by VLC and thus by Phonon-VLC. The 
Phonon-VLC developers just didn't know and so they did not include them in the list of supported 
files, which caused Amarok to refuse to play them. I wrote a bugreport and so they where simply 
added. However, I forgot .mod in the bugreport, so I just wrote a new one just for .mod:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=280993

So the next Phonon-VLC version will support tracker files.

If you are still using KDE 4.6 you can't use a recent Phonon-VLC (API changes). But because the fix 
for these file formats is trivial I patched the last Phonon-VLC version compatible with KDE 4.6:
https://github.com/panzi/phonon-vlc/tree/module_files_for_kde_4.6


> 2. Be able to play streamed or remote media like the one that is present in
> Last.fm, Magnatune or Jamendo (all of which have Amarok interfaces). Here
> Phonon-gstreamer is much worse (due to an unreleased bug fix), and phonon-vlc
> is better.
>
> As a result, it seems that phonon is a quirky abstraction (see
> http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/49510.html ) that completely ruins the
> Amarok experience for me. Can anyone look into releasing new stable versions
> of the phonon backends with all these problems fixed?
>
> Regards,
>
> 	Shlomi Fish