Playing CDs -- KDE problem, or Amarok problem?

[Valorie Zimmerman]

On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 3:45 AM, Valorie Zimmerman
<valorie.zimmerman at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hearing of another complaint about playing CDs in Amarok, I tried one,
> without success. http://amarok.pastebin.ca/1872532 for the very
> strange output.
>
> Since the IRC channel has been quiet, due to many of the developers
> being on the road to Randa, I also mentioned this issue in
> #kubuntu-devel, and here is some of the discussion following:
>
> [14:17] <rgreening> [23:54:24] Riddell: CD Audio in general appears
> broken. Kaffiene, Dragon and Amarok all fail to play Audio CD's. Well,
> Kaffiene plays the first song and I cannot skip to any other songs.
> [14:17] <rgreening> [00:24:44] Riddell: kscd doesn't work either
> [14:17] <rgreening> [00:25:09] only vlc works, which doesn't use the
> KDE backends (iirc)
> [14:17] <rgreening> [00:41:27] Riddell: looks to be a bug with KDE
> looking for /dev/cdrom regardless of how Audio CD is configured in
> system settings. On my system my cdrom shows up as /dev/cdrom4 ->
> /dev/sr0. Seems it only works if I symlink /dev/cdrom -> /dev/sr0.
> This is bad. Guess 1) udev rules needs a fix and 2) KDE need some
> fixing to be not so restrictive?
>
> By the way, I'm using Amarok with the phonon-vlc backend. VLC itself
> does work; that same CD plays in VLC.
>
> [14:17] <Riddell> [05:24:12] I expect /dev/cdrom stopped being useful
> ages ago but solid is behind on these things
> [14:17] <valorie> [05:25:17] so can I report to the Amarok users
> complaining about this that it's a KDE bug which will be fixed?
> [14:17] <Riddell> [05:39:36] valorie: I'm just guessing, it depends
> where Amarok gets "/dev/cdrom" from, but there's probably some new
> udevy interface that gives it the right answer which isn't being used
> [14:17] <valorie> [05:44:26] but if: [20:58] <rgreening> Riddell: CD
> Audio in general appears broken. Kaffiene, Dragon and Amarok all fail
> to play Audio CD's. Well, Kaffiene plays the first song and I cannot
> skip to any other songs.
> [14:17] <Riddell> [05:44:53] so whatever is going wrong, it's
> happening in other apps too :)
> [14:17] <valorie> [05:45:01] right
> [14:17] <valorie> [05:45:19] but if amarok fixes that, what happens
> with the others?
> [14:17] <valorie> [05:45:30] I know that few people play CDs on their computers
> [14:17] <valorie> [05:45:37] but some do
> [14:17] <Riddell> [05:45:59] we'd need to find out what the correct
> low level method of finding out where your audio cd drive is these
> days, what's the correct layer for that to be exposed in KDE (solid?)
> and then whether the applications use that or not
> [14:17] <Riddell> [05:46:37] and it may well involve porting solid
> away from hal which is no small task
>
> When I mentioned that I would be sending all this to the list:
>
> [14:17] <Riddell> [05:52:21] feel free but remember it's just the
> ramblings of an ill-informed distro packager :)
>
> Later: 14:17] <rgreening> [08:48:19] so, KDE seems to require/depend
> on the Audio CD being the first configued device /dev/cdrom. That's
> bad
>
> ...
> [14:17] <rgreening> [09:03:19] agateau, JontheEchidna: running amarok
> from cmdline and with "Specify CD Device" unchecked, amarok still does
> this...
> [14:17] <rgreening> [09:03:19] Checking /dev/cdrom for cdrom...
> [14:17] <rgreening> [09:03:19]         Could not stat /dev/cdrom: No
> such file or directory
> [14:17] <rgreening> [09:03:23] grr
> [14:17] <rgreening> [09:04:48] agateau, JontheEchidna: and checking
> the box again but setting it to the correct /dev/cdrom1, amarok still
> spits out looking for /dev/cdrom
>
> [14:17] <agateau> [09:51:20] rgreening: amarok from master does not play cd here
> [14:17] <agateau> [09:51:29] rgreening: neither from cdrom nor from cdrom1
> [14:17] <rgreening> [09:52:50] ok, so not a distro problem necessarily...
> [14:17] <rgreening> [09:53:02] unless it's a udev/hal issue
>
> Perhaps someone here can shed light. It's annoying that CD playing is
> lacking again.

New paste, since pastebin.ca seems to have crashed. http://pastie.org/971665

I'm filing a bug, which hopefully will be kicked up to KDE developers.

Valorie