The Amarok machine ;-)

[Martin Steigerwald]

Hi!

Just as a feedback about how much I love Amarok ;-). Due to my website 
still lacking an up to date (and not statically in HTML written down 
ancient) blog, just the pictures:

http://martin-steigerwald.de/amarok-machine/

;-)

On this machine - a used ThinkPad T23 - I used the desktop responsiveness 
patches by Con Koliva for a long time, tested his new scheduler Stair 
Case and now use the new CFS scheduler by Ingo Molnar which is inspired 
from Con's Stair Case. With all of those I get absolutely fluid music 
playback no matter what (in certain reasonable limits of course). I can 
compile kernels, aptitude dist-upgrade, open lots of applications and 
move the Amarok window like mad without a single glitch in music 
playback.

Well and Amarok itself just rocks. Its playback is not tied to X11 gfx 
updates - which helps with above tests ;-). Often I let it play for hours 
in dynamic mode. Sometimes I drop in some songs I like to hear at the 
moment. At the moment I do not even have the CD player connected to my 
hi-fi system, cause I simply didn't use it for the last weeks.

I use suspend2 in order switch on and off my Amarok machine easily. Now I 
even tried letting Amarok playing when I snapshot the machine, well and 
it works: If I start it again Amarok continues playing roughly were it 
stopped. I still stop ALSA manually before suspend and start it after 
resume touch, but that works. I often have uptimes for days and if I do 
not compile a new kernel that often weeks, and that includes Amarok as 
well cause usually I never ever quit it again ;-).

There is just one glitch I have with Amarok:

When I use blending in and out between songs, sometimes Amarok blends in a 
new song for a few seconds after the old one is finished, then instead of 
continuing to play the new song it blends out this song as well and 
startings playing the next song after it. Thus sometimes it skips a song 
for - at least in my perception - no apparent reason.

I switched Amarok not to use blend-in and blend-out at the moment, but I 
am not sure whether the problem has gone by that, cause now then Amarok 
skips a song I may not notice it at all.

I was never able to find a pattern in that behavior and didn't report it 
yet.

Regards,
-- 
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA  B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7
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