A few nights ago, I decided to upgrade the Ubuntu operating system from 8.10 Intrepid Ibex to 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. (Yeah, yeah. I should be at 10.04 Lucid Lynx right now. I’ll get around to it.) Everything went along swimmingly with the applications I’ve had installed… until I ran Amarok.
Amarok version 1.something had been automatically upgraded by the OS level-up to version 2.0. The user interface looks somewhat different. But more important than that, there was no sound!
Upon executing the application the systray warned me, “Phonon: KDE’s Multimedia Library. The audio playback device HDA Intel (AD198x Analog) does not work. Failing back to default.” Playing any songs, a warning would pop up, “Too many errors encountered in playlist. Stopped playback.” When I played the same songs using Totem, they worked perfectly.
So I did a some Googling and discovered this solution which worked.
1. Create the file libphonon.conf
- Launch a text editor
- Copy paste the following:
[%General] HideAdvancedDevices=true [AudioOutputDevice] Category_-1=@Variant(\0\0\0\x7f\0\0\0\vQList\0\0\0\0\x4\0\0'\x11\0\0'\x12\0\0'\x10\0\0'\x13) Category_0=@Variant(\0\0\0\x7f\0\0\0\vQList\0\0\0\0\x4\0\0'\x12\0\0'\x11\0\0'\x10\0\0'\x13) Category_1=@Variant(\0\0\0\x7f\0\0\0\vQList\0\0\0\0\x4\0\0'\x12\0\0'\x11\0\0'\x10\0\0'\x13) Category_2=@Variant(\0\0\0\x7f\0\0\0\vQList\0\0\0\0\x4\0\0'\x12\0\0'\x11\0\0'\x10\0\0'\x13) Category_3=@Variant(\0\0\0\x7f\0\0\0\vQList\0\0\0\0\x4\0\0'\x12\0\0'\x11\0\0'\x10\0\0'\x13) Category_4=@Variant(\0\0\0\x7f\0\0\0\vQList\0\0\0\0\x4\0\0'\x12\0\0'\x11\0\0'\x10\0\0'\x13) Category_5=@Variant(\0\0\0\x7f\0\0\0\vQList\0\0\0\0\x4\0\0'\x12\0\0'\x11\0\0'\x10\0\0'\x13) [AudioCaptureDevice] Category_-1=@Variant(\0\0\0\x7f\0\0\0\vQList\0\0\0\0\0)
- Save it with the filename libphonon.conf
2. Open the home directory. Hit Ctrl+H to see hidden files and click on the .config director.
3. See if directory kde.org exists. If not create the kde.org directory there.
4. Put the libphonon.conf file in the kde.org directory.
5. Open Terminal and type these commands.
-
sudo apt-get install phonon-backend-xine
-
sudo apt-get remove phonon-backend-gstreamer
Once these are done, Amarok 2.0 should be working fine again.
Sources:
