Ah, amaroK :)
Posted by Skrud at Wednesday, July 13th 2005 at 4:15pm
I used to stay away from amaroK like it was the plague - mainly because it used to crash literally every 5 seconds. Not a very useful music player in that sense ;) But recently I’ve started using it again. Until now I’ve been using Rhythmbox for my Linux music needs, because it comes stock with Ubuntu and Gnome, but I find Rhythmbox to have a very primitive interface which is not very configurable. It acts a lot lile iTunes but nearly as smoothly or as fluidly - and worst of all it would crash in the middle of the night.
What I did like about Rhythmbox though was that with the right GStreamer plugins it would play anything at all. And that’s kind of important because my music tends to be in a ton of formats other than the “typical” MP3 and OGG. That includes AAC/M4A (thanks to iTunes + my PowerBook), Musepack, AC3, etc. JuK, the most simplistic and versatile music player for KDE - and my favourite - just couldn’t handle these files, despite the fact that it should support anything that GStreamer supports.
So I gave amaroK a shot. And it doesn’t crash as often anymore - which is a good thing. The GStreamer engine still had some trouble with AAC files so I hooked up the Xine engine. The best part about Xine is that it supports 5.1 surround sound… so those AC3 DVD rips of Nightwish’s Once come through much better than they did before. So far so good :)
funnily, most of these amarok crashes are related to gstreamer, anyways. disabling x-fading and stuff helps, since it’s basically just a hack due to the limited design of gstreamer itself. xine is way more stable, though.
…muesli
gstreamer has never worked properly for me.
Recipe for instant crashing: Use gstreamer’s microphone/recording application. Try it.