I want my reliable laptop based Amarok jukebox back

[Myriam Schweingruber]

On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 2:37 PM, Martin Steigerwald <Martin at lichtvoll.de> wrote:
> Am Samstag, 10. August 2013, 14:29:59 schrieb Myriam Schweingruber:
>> Hi Martin,
>>
>> On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 3:08 PM, Martin Steigerwald <Martin at lichtvoll.de>
...

> I still wonder how I can say in which layer a given problem is and how I can
> debug stuff effectively. Do you know any HOWTO for this?


That's quite easy, Amarok does little to the sound itself, it lets
Phonon do all the work, so if you have sound issues, then most likely
it is somewhere in either Phonon or the underlying Alsa (once the
hardware is ruled out).

The only thing I know of that can interfere with sound quality where
Amarok is doing something is the ReplayGain function. Everything else
should be handled by PA - Phonon - Alsa. Crashes can be caused by
those as well, and there is a known crash due to a QtWebKit -
gstreamer interaction that was fixed in 2.7.1 already (actually a
workaround in Amarok to cope with the QtWebKit issue).

Mind you, I am not a developer, but I would debug sound problems in
Amarok in the following way:

* Activate the Phonon debugging stuff as described here:
http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Debugging/Phonon
* Start Amarok in a debug mode from a konsole with 'amarok -d --nofork'
* Disable all 3rd-party scripts as we are not responsible for those,
and any help request would ahve to be addressed to the script author
directly
* Disable ReplayGain to rule out that as a first try. If that is the
culprit, file a bug report.
* Try both backends, the gstreamer and the vlc one (don't forget to
restart Amarok when doing so).
* Report bugs for the identified backend, ideally with test files if
there is a particular track having problems.

I strongly suggest you use distribution default settings when it comes
to Phonon and Pulseaudio, so if a basic installation gives you PA,
don't remove it afterwards, as it was obviously meant to be used with
it. Since Kubuntu uses basically what Sid provides, with rather small
changes to KDE, I think you should first rule out that you didn't
inadvertently disable PA when ti was meant to be used.

To answer one question you had previously: I have very good sound
quality here from a rather generic built-in sound card, but I do send
the output to external speakers, and the speaker quality is important
here.

Hope this helps.


Regards, Myriam

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