I want my reliable laptop based Amarok jukebox back

[Myriam Schweingruber]

Hi Martin,

On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 3:08 PM, Martin Steigerwald <Martin at lichtvoll.de> wrote:
> Using phonon-backends mailing list as I didn´t found any user related phonon
> mailing list, if people who can help with phonon are subscribed to Amarok
> mailing list, feel free to drop phonon-backends mailing list from Cc.
...
> I am even willing to replace hardware. If a ThinkPad or netbookt with Intel HD
> audio provides a similar sound quality to that USB sound card, I´d buy one and
> ditch the USB sound card. If a USB 2 based sound card is likely to work
> better, I´d buy one. I do not insist on the exact hardware, a ThinkPad T6x
> with Intel HD Audio costs less than 200 Euro used, so what gives.

Well, your hardware is not exactly new, and the USB sound card is
really old technology, I really can't judge as I have absolutely
nothing equivalent to test with.

...
> Software wise I use Debian Sid with KDE SC 4.10.5 and Amarok 2.7.1-1 and
> phonon 4.6.0.0-3 with phonon-backend-vlc 0.6.2-2 with ALSA. I didn´t use
> gstreamer as it skipped tracks and whatnot. I do not remember exactly what all
> happened with it, but it didn´t work for me. Kernel is 3.10-1-686-pae from
> official experimental debian package.
>

FWIW: I can't reproduce any of the problems you mention on my Lenovo
X220 ThinkPad (on-board Intel sound card), running Amarok from git in
a daily build, Kubuntu 13.04, KDE 4.10.98. Gstreamer backend 4.6.3,
but it also works well with the vlc backend 0.6.2

...

> I do not use Pulseaudio 4 right now cause it still does not detect the USB
> sound card at all times, spamming logs with "usb_set_interface_failed"
> messages. I reported this once, Lennart even answered me back to my bug report
> and I admit I did not follow up then, cause what he asked me to do would have
> take some time to do and it was not the only bug with PulseAudio back then. I
> was just so annoyed by PulseAudio back then that I apt-get purge´d it. I would
> be willing to follow-up with this, as it seems that Pulseaudio 4 is the first
> Pulseaudio *ever* that is able to play *fluent* sound on the ThinkPad T42. With
> Pulseaudio 3 still I had sound drops longer than 20 seconds (this is *no*
> joke).

Kubuntu uses Pulseaudio by default, and Phonon is compiled with PA
support, which should be pretty standard currently. If you did remove
Pulseaudio deliberately this might explain some of the sound problems
you experience.

We released Amarok 2.8 beta several weeks ago, and there have been
many fixes in the engine controller stack since 2.7.0, how about
giving it a try? With over 500 commits since 2.7.0 there has been a
lot of work put into it, fixing a lot of bugs and glitches.


Regards, Myriam

-- 
Proud member of the Amarok and KDE Community
Protect your freedom and join the Fellowship of FSFE:
http://www.fsfe.org
Please don't send me proprietary file formats,
use ISO standard ODF instead (ISO/IEC 26300)