A while ago, I upgraded my Ubuntu from 8.10 to 9.04. Everything went smoothly and after the upgrade most of the applications seemed to run fine. One problem which I noticed almost immediately was caused by Amarok which was updated from the beautiful 1.4.x to the disappointing 2.0.
I wasn’t too happy with this change especially because a few months ago I tried an Amarok 2.0 snapshot, but I reversed to 1.4.x quickly because I wasn’t happy with the features it offered. I was even more upset when I noticed that Amarok would not play any of my music. Initially I thought that I do not have the necessary codecs installed, but this should not have been the case because I used to be able to play both mp3 and ogg files in the 1.4.x.. To make the situation even more confusing I was able to play online streams. After a bit of googling, I came across the MP3 support in Amarok 2 entry in the Amarok forum which suggested a few ways of addressing the problem. In my case all I had to do was:
- Install phonon-backend-xine package
- Start a terminal and run the systemsettings command to get the KDE control center
- Go to Multimedia -> Backend and selected Xine as backend
- Start Amarok and enjoy my music :)
Probably I should mention that I am using Gnome, not KDE. Maybe Kubuntu installs phonon-backend-xine automatically so this solution may not be useful for you.
For now, I am using Amarok as any other media player, but I hope in the new versions features that were removed in the 2.0 version will appear again.
