Amarok is Usable Again!

Okay, I feel kinda bad after my last Amarok rant. I really do like the thing on a good day, it's just got some weird quirks.

I managed to fix some of my problems today, and they weren't all Amarok's fault.

The intermittent crashing I finally tracked down to a gstreamer bug. I managed to patch it myself, before realizing that it was already fixed in git. At any rate, not Amarok's fault, and not a problem any more.

My playlist filtering has actually been working, I just have this block of 100+ tracks that seem to be immune. I'm going to assume that it can't index them for some reason, and displays them by default. Weird default behavior maybe, but whatever. Removing them from my play list solves the problem, so I'm happy.

I used to have issues with other applications stealing my sound and cutting off Amarok, or vice versa, yay linux sound! This seems to be a xine-lib problem, and switching everything to gstreamer solves it. Ironically, switching to gstreamer forced me to upgrade all my gstreamer plugins to get .m4a files working which exposed the aforementioned crashing bug. At any rate, Amarok's off the hook on this one.

And for the record, the new versions have dramatically improved performance when updating meta-data, though I'll still get the 1-minute cpu-bound hangs every once in a while for some operations. To be honest this really puzzles me, since while I was looking at backtraces from the crashing problem, it's running 28 separate threads at any given time, most of which are running mysql code. I guess they're not getting a whole lot of parallelism out of them for whatever weird cases I trigger.

But yeah, Amarok's back in my good graces for the moment.