Amarok

[seablade]

Ok giving it another shot... again... for some strange reason...

From everything I have heard about amarok, I would REALLY like to get this bugger working, emerged it with both gstreamer and alsa flags on, yet I cant seem to get this thing to detect my audio at all. It shouldnt need arts right? If it does it may have just become forever unuseable for me as I refuse to run arts on this machine since I do audio on it.

Anyways I load it up and first thing that happens, get a message saying Xine cant initialize any audio devices. Tried pointing it to /dev/dsp and running it with aoss, no go on either. Gstreamer cant even find /dev/dsp when trying to play a file. It does exist though so I dont know what to do about that.

Try running it in aoss without it pointing to an audio device(Just letting it use alsa default) with no luck. Says it is already locked up by another device.

Gstreamer plugin normal, alsasink, no device selected(Default used)
For whatever reason I cant add wave files I can play in alsaplayer to the playlist to try with those. I try with the audio streams and get nothing, though I do get some errors shown on occasion, mostly look like debugging errors though I havent managed to copy one yet, for all intents and purposes it looks like it is playing, but no audio showing in hdspmixer...

so pretty much I still cant manage to get the bugger working and am open to any suggestions. And oh yea, it locks up my audio device again so I have to reboot to use it at all.

Seablade

[c0bblers]

Ok giving it another shot... again... for some strange reason...

It's worth a go, amarok it by far the best audio app I've found so far.

From everything I have heard about amarok, I would REALLY like to get this bugger working, emerged it with both gstreamer and alsa flags on, yet I cant seem to get this thing to detect my audio at all. It shouldnt need arts right? If it does it may have just become forever unuseable for me as I refuse to run arts on this machine since I do audio on it.

Amarok shouldn't need arts, it can use 3 different audio backends, Xine, ARTS, and gstreamer. Arts is thankfully getting killed off soon. Did you compile amarok with the xine USE flag?

Anyways I load it up and first thing that happens, get a message saying Xine cant initialize any audio devices. Tried pointing it to /dev/dsp and running it with aoss, no go on either. Gstreamer cant even find /dev/dsp when trying to play a file. It does exist though so I dont know what to do about that.

Answered my question on the Xine front I guess. I'm assuming you're using alsa sound drivers and that all works in other programs? Anyways, if you're using alsa you shouldn't be using /dev/dsp unless you REALLY have to (i.e. the program only supports OSS). Make sure that you compiled xine-lib and/or gstreamer with alsa support.

Try running it in aoss without it pointing to an audio device(Just letting it use alsa default) with no luck. Says it is already locked up by another device.

Aoss evil, avoid like the plague. Have you tried switching the backend that amarok uses to gstreamer to see if that works? You might want to emerge xine-ui to check that the xine libraries all work properly.

Cheers,
James

[seablade]

Have not gotten the Xine backend to work on the xine-ui.

Tried with all possible combinations I could think of of xine and gstreamer, and both of those were in the USE for amarok.

Though I will qualify something you said, best audio app, nah, best audio library playback app, maybe- except I can never get it to work;) Yea im annoying like that, yea ardour, jack, and rezound;)

Seablade

[bigtrouble77]

Here's my use flags... Nothing special, unfortunately.
USE="gtk gnome qt kde dvd alsa cdr apache2 dvb usb lirc X mysql jack"

[seablade]

Yea nothing different there that should make a difference in the audio for me I dont think. Very odd. Yours worked right outta the portage correct BT?

Seablade

[seablade]

Ok so after playing with many things I think GStreamer plugin may be recognizing my audio now, but I cant be sure cause when ever I try to play media it has severe problems playing any media.

And why the heck can Amarok not recognize a .wav file? Good grief, I finally figured that one out eventually but that would seem like a most basic thing to have in there. Instead even to add it to my collection I had to encode it as a flac, not that i have a problem with flac mind you, it just amazes me there isnt even support for .wav files in amarok, since that is one of the easiest to support.

So now it appears I have some problems with playback, not real sure what problems exactly, I still cant get xine to recognize my hardware, still working on that one, but when playing with gstreamer a 7:16 second track I hear no audio and stops playing(Presumably Amarok thinks it is done) within 5 seconds.

Seablade

[seablade]

Ok working on xine in its own ui to try to get the xine-lib working, it seems to be playing, has visulatization, but no audio thus far. I am wondering if this might be because the HDSP I have doesnt use the traditional alsa mixer which xine seems to be expecting. IN which case I aint got a clue how to fix that one, but when xine first opens the audio is all the way down and I can adjust it, I get no errors on console or otherwise about not being able to sue the audio driver, so everything seems to be working except a severe lack of sound.

Seablade

[seablade]

Hmm for some reason during playback the xine-ui resets the volume control back to zero, again this makes me wonder if it is using the correct mixer or how to even possibly change this...

Seablade

[seablade]

Ok next thing, when I use the ALSA default in xine for mono and stereo playback, it says something else is using the device. Yet when I point it to hw:0,0 it plays, no audio, but it seems to play as I have visualization and it proceeds along the timeline. However when doing this my choices for audio ALSA mixer device dissapear.

Also when I set the audio mixer method on the gui tap of the xine ui to software my volume control behaves like normal(No resets, saves level all that jazz) but still no audio.

So there is definitly something screwy with the xinelib configuration being used, I figure if I Can get it working in xineui then I can start on getting it working on Amarok.

Seablade

[bigtrouble77]

Sorry I can't help. My amaroK just worked out of the box, how's that for irony? Audio stuff never works well for me.

[bucktoothviking]

ahahahahahhahahah i got the 1000 post here wahahahahahwhahwwhawhah

[c0bblers]

Hmm, some wierd stuff going on there. Do you have anything running that might be using the soundcard at all when you're doing all this?

[seablade]

Nope.

Seablade

[c0bblers]

Hmmm...running out of ideas :). There's a command line tool for looking at what devices are available that might help some, not at my lappy so I can't look for what it is though. alsactl maybe. You said in another thread about using a 2nd soundcard, are you trying to get the 2nd card working here or the onboard? If you're trying the 2nd card can you get things to work on the onboard?

[seablade]

I am not using a second card. There are two in my computer, however only one is running and that is an RME card(hw:0,0). The RME card has a DSP processor onboard to do some mixing, so the outputs are technically virtual outputs and I think that may be screwing with things, I dont think xine or gstreamer can handle that by default. I have found references to people running amarok(And xine) with RME cards though and them going through hoops to get it working, but no documentation as to how it was done.

Seablade

[c0bblers]

Ahh you have one of them crazy complex RME jobbies. Never used anything that complex before myself since I'm not that into hardcore audio stuff. Anways, you've probably found this already but perhaps it'll help http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7024.

[seablade]

Yep been there seen it;) It didnt do the greatest job describing some things, but is one of the better resources out there, but it is mainly for setting up the hardware, which is already done in my case. This is entierly a software configuration issue I am trying to work out.

Seablade