Amarok in FC4 Gnome = FRUSTRATION!
 

I am currently running Gnome 2.8 in FC4. I have a 4G iPod and I have been experimenting with the various players (gtkpod, etc). At any rate, I really like the lyrics and album art features in amarok (and the support for the iPod) so I installed it via yum.

The problem is that it only plays the first 4 or 5 seconds of a song (no sound) and simply won't progress any further. The rest of the interface responds just fine so, the program does not seem to be frozen. It just refuses to progress any further in the track. It does this with any .mp3 file.

On a whim, I tried to play one of my .m4a files. The .m4a file played but it was extremely choppy (sounded TERRIBLE!). I then converted the file to .ogg. The .ogg file played also but it sounded as bad as the .m4a. Finally, I converted the file to .mp3 and confirmed what I had already observed...it played the first few seconds and halted.

Based on one of the forum replies, I even uninstalled amarok and added the kde-redhat.repo to my yum.repos.d and then reinstalled amarok. That version appeared to be older and just flashed and crashed whenever I tried to start it.

So...I'm back to the original version from extras and still unable to play music. I'm fairly new to Linux...not quite a newbie but, not a pro either. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

This looks like an engine problem. What engine are you using? When in trouble I recommend using xine.

I am using Gstreamer with alsasink. I'll give Xine a go tonight and see what happens.

Also, do not force the alsasink, leave it in Autodetect, dunno why but this causes problems in my box, though I havent heard of it from other users.

Xine does not seem to be an option. I have GStreamer, Helix, aRts and <no engine> options. I do have Xine installed and it seems to work fine. Is there something special I need to do to enable it in amarok?

Yep, you need to install amarok-xine from kde-redhat.

Awesome!! Thanks Mebrelith. It worked like a charm. I am now happily listening to my tunes in Amarok :p

You don't happen to know how to allow it to write to the iPod do you? Once I mount the iPod, it shows up in the device browser and displays the iTunes db but, when I try to delete a song, it looks like it works but it doesn't delete the song. It won't let me write songs either.

The last peculiarity may not be related to Amarok but, my iPod is now skipping songs. For example, if I choose an artist/album, it may start at song 5 then skip to song 12, etc. The first thought is that shuffle is on, right? Nope. It actually seems to scan through the ones it doesn't play and the sequence is EXACTLY the same for the selected artist/album with every run through. Any ideas?

Sorry mate have zero experience with iPods. Im an old fashioned cd-mp3-portablecdrw-player user. :)

Thanks anyway :D

Does anyone else have any thoughts?