Firstly, I'd like to say..that I spend most of my time (when on the computer) chatting on kopete, browsing the net, doing graphics in The GIMP, and more importantly...listening to my mp3's.

I've been having quite some trouble lately with amarok, and keeping everything stable while playing sounds. Normally, I'd just install amarok and use the Arts plugin for amarok to listen to music. This would always work flawlessly. Now that I'm using SuSE 9.3 with kde 3.4..it's anything but that.

If using the arts plugin for amarok..after awhile of playing music (30 minutes?) amarok will freeze..and the rest of the song will continue to play. After that...it's still frozen, and I must kill amarok.

So..I implemented the Dmix plugin with alsa..so I can play more sounds at once...and have been using the gstreamer plugin with amarok. (artsink)

Amarok will randomly close...freeze...and cause so many problems. Especially if I simply have amarok open, but not playing..and execute a video or movie that has sound. It will cause my computer to lag severely, and arts will crash. Also, when playing music..I totally lag...and often times arts will die.

I've tried recompilings arts AND amarok..but still...same issue. I'm also using the latest alsa..and my soundcard is supported (and have never really had problems with it before.)

I don't get it. I wish playing music could be...simple...like it should be.

Any suggestions? I've run out of ideas.

I don't know if you have a specific reason for using Arts as it does tend to be a resource hog. I recommend setting GStreamer to use the Alsasink output plugin and DMix should handle the mixing of the sound from there, which would bypass Arts entirely.

I've tried them all...it wasn't the plugin that was the problem. I'm not exactly sure what it was...but all of the plugins gave me the same exact problems.

However..I found out my problem I think..finally! Well, I don't know what the specific problem was..but it was KDE related. I downloaded a CVS snapshot of kdemultimedia..which has arts and everything else...

Anyway...got it..compiled and installed it...ever since, my computer has been running 100 % smoother..and amarok plays through my playlist fine...no lag or crashes.

So far so good..I'm feeling a huge improvement.