Amarok navigation slow/choppy, yet playback is fine in SUSE 10.0.
 

After months of experimenting with various distros (everything from Debian Sarge to Mandriva) I'm trying to find my permanent Linux "home". SUSE 10.0 has all of the features I want, was easy enough to tweak (to improve browser performance, add mp3 supprt, etc), and it genearlly performs well on my old PII 450 with 256 megs of RAM. Unfortunately Amarok, one of my all-time favorite apps, runs terribly. Just scrolling through my music collection while playing a song is slow and to make matters worse, it slows everything else down as well. The odd thing is, the music doesn't skip or stutter even though the rest of my system performs choppily.

If it matters, My music is stored in two seperate partitions, one fat32 partion on the same drive as SUSE, and one fat32 partition on a seperate drive with Windows 98. I haven't tried XMMS or any of the console media players, but I have tried JuK, which doesn't have the massive performance hitches that Amarok does, but still slows everything down when loading another track.

Is there some background process that could be causing this? That was the case with Firefox, but I haven't been able to find any info regarding my specific problems with Amarok.

Thanks in advance for any help you may be able to provide.

This will not help you, but I observed some perfomance problems as well on a significantly faster machine. I guess Amarok is simply using too many resources.

Hi,
I notice the amarok choppiness on my Suse 10.0
install also. If I boot up another distro on the
same box it goes away. Oh well. TS

Hi,
Ha! I just glanced at related posts and saw
the suggestion to switch the engine to xine. I thought
for sure that's how I set it up but when I double
checked it was using Helix. I switched to xine and
now it sounds fine. TS

Fixed the problem. I found some info on speeding up access to my partitions from a website (to which I can't post the link because I haven't made enough posts) and added "noatime" to the fstab lines for my fat32 partitions. It just so happens that at the same time I was using YOU, which upgraded my kernel. As I'm using legacy nvidia drivers I rebooted and had to disable the driver to start x. I tried Amarok and thought the problem was solved (scrolling through my playlist and changing tracks now worked fine, and with nowhere near the performance hit I was experiencing before). Then I re-compiled my nvidia kernel, rebooted and found that my problems were back (though not quite as bad as before thanks, I think, to altering my fstab), I then realized that my problem was my nvidia driver, for whatever reason.

For the time being, I've disabled the drivers and everything works fine. If anyone has any info on how to make the nvidia drivers play nice with Amarok, I'd appreciate it.