I've just upgraded (clean install) to Slackware64 14.0. Everything is running perfect, even the boot is faster. The only piece of software I was not happy was Amarok.

It doesn't play MP3's out of the box, but I understand why, and had even installed gst-plugins-ugly, but it made Amarok crash (probably some incompatibilty with my sound card). I then installed AlienBOB's phonon-vlc, and I was finally able to play music files. So far, so good.

The problem is that it occasionally freezes, most of the time when scanning my music folder to update the library. When this happens, even killing the process is difficult, so I can't restart the application.

Is there anybody else having similar problems and unsatisfied with Amarok performance?

NO.... Amarok works fine here without any problems. Sometimes it does scan my music folder, but it doesn't take too much CPU

Amarok works great here and has seldom playedmp3's OoB for me anyway. Vic is the third package I install on a new system and VLC-phonon is number 4. The only annoying thing it does is remind me that I have a lot of duplicate files when it rescans, but it's always done that.

I don't use amarok 2 because it was ALWAYS unstable for me. Random crashes etc. However I didn't use the latest version, so it could be fixed by now. I prefer using clementine which is a qt4 fork of amarok 1. Works nice :-) You can find it on slackbuilds.org.

agreed. i much prefer clementine as well,, amarok is too bloated

I've debugged a little, and found out that the function "DirWatchJob::run" was causing the freeze. Planning to make a Bug report in http://bugs.kde.org soon.

Scanning the library for new music works fine, the problem is the "daemon" that sporadically verifies for new musics in the folders.
So I just unchecked the option "Watch folders for changes" option and Amarok stopped freezing.

Unfortunately Amarok seems to get less stable with each release. I thought for some reason that KDE wasn't remembering to load it when I logged in, only to find out that it was pretty consistently crashing at startup. It's seemed fine today but it is quite flaky.

What is that reason why? I have the same problem (actually I think I have two (a) Amarok won't play MP3s and (b) it is having trouble accessing my audio card) and I don't recall having the same problems with previous Amaroks as supplied in Slackware 13.37 and 13.
If the phonon-vlc install the solution?
Thanks

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If you have VLC installed and it will play mp3's, then yes it will fix it if you set VLC to be the backend

I guessed the reason is that MP3 (and other audio and video formats) is a proprietary format, so you can't include it out-of-the-box without paying some royalties.

To have MP3 working in Amarok you have to use a compatible phonon backend installed.

To use the "phonon-vlc", you should also have the "vlc" package installed.
Then in Amarok, go to Settings > Playback > Configure Phonon > Backend, and put the VLC in the top of the priority queue.

Thanks for the help. Just to confirm - phonon-vlc did the trick and Amarok now plays my music collection again. Strange thing is I don't recall having to do this with previous versions of Slackware. I thought that if you loaded up the right codecs, the ALSA system would find them and use them. Anyway, it works now so I'm not going to try and figure out what happened previously. Might give Clementine a try-out since many people seem to rate this player.

Clementine's good (though I never managed to get it to build in Slackware until just now), as is Audacious.

I run Slackware 14 on an older machine, which I use as a media center. Once I discovered MPD (Music Player Daemon), and the Sonata client for it, I never looked back. Full-featured, and uses nearly no resources.

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