I'm now finished with Amarok

[Thomas Lübking]

Am 09.04.2011, 13:27 Uhr, schrieb AG <computing.account at googlemail.com>:

> After so many different attempts to make Amarok work, I am sorry to say
> this but I am now done with this damned thing.
So your approach was to try on your own instead of asking and when you  
couldn't bear it anymore you decided to inform the general amarok list  
(not even the devs).
Sounds not very smart to me - unless you just want to troll around, then  
it's a pretty perfect strategy (and given your mail address i'm actually  
quite sure i'll just waste my time to a troll by the following reply, but  
i cannot help myself - the first lines may sound a bit harsh to get a  
non-troll's brain down to the ground ;-)

> It has proven itself to be terminally buggy on my system
And you get to the diagnosis "terminally" on what kind of knowledge about  
the system internals?

> plays for a few days then without warning and with no changes to my  
> system aside from KDE updates on
what basically means "i did nothing... except for loading packages that  
impact the complete library base of the application - and might do  
whatever else"

> Debian testing, it just stops playing.  It loads the track and gets  
> stuck on pause - despite my best efforts to change that status.
and your "best efforts" have been exactly what, except for clicking the  
play button a lot of times?

> UI have renamed and then removed the ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok and  
> relevant config files
please define "relevant config files" - also this is no problem solving  
but mindless freaking around.
Sorry but if you want to get a problem fixed and are older than three  
years, one would expect another and more directed approach.

> so many times now and that helps for a bit,
"for a bit" means: "everything works as expected, but for a short time  
only" or "some things work, but not as expected" or what?
once again: ranting may be helpful to your mind, but not to solve any kind  
of problem.

> but then Amarok just decides to quit playing again.
maybe it's in its monthly period...
It does certainly not "decide" to do things - either you changed sth.  
substantially (eg. in the phonon configuration or replacing the mp3  
decoder lib with a stub to convince the f**** IFPI or whatever) or there's  
a bug that shows up on doing sth. specific, like loading a particular file  
or stream or adding maaaaany entries to the playlist or whatever.
Computers are no women (sorry to every woman out there, but it's like that  
;-) and if they start to do things out of apparently some bad mood that  
usually means some buffer overflow or broken hardware.

> Unless KDE and Amarok learn how to play nicely on this system, then  
> Amarok has to go in favour of JaJuk.
Theatric, but pointless nevertheless. No software can learn "how to play  
nicely" on an unspecified system.

Now, if you really want things to work you first need to identify the  
problem and i mean more than "it's broken".
It includes at least a detailed description of
a) your system setup (esp. sound related like in this case phonon version  
& backend)
b) what leads to the problem (it works and after some time it stops  
working and what except for installing undefined packages did happen  
inbetween and what packages did you install)
c) running amarok in debug mode from a text shell "amarok --debug"

Then you would file a bug report specifying the issue and in doubt ask for  
insight/help.

Cheers,
Thomas