So, a few weeks ago I wanted to play play some music. Amarok2 was only playing one track at time. Hmm, rather than fight with it, maybe it is time to investigate alternatives. So here is my story. Mac using friends will probably find this amusing.

• minirok segfaults as soon I try to do something #544230

• bluemingo seems to only understand mp3's

• exaile didn't play m4a (these are ripped with faac, so no DRM) files out of the box. A small amount of googling didn't explain it.

• mpd looks cool, but I didn't really want to bother with that amount of setup right now.

• Quod Libet also seems to have some configuration issues preventing it from playing m4a's

• I hate the interface of Audacious

• mocp looks cool, like mpd but easier to set up, but crashes trying to play an m4a file. This looks a lot like #530373

• qmmp + xmonad = user interface fail.

• juk also seems not to play (or catalog) my m4a's

In the end I went back and had a second look at mpd, and I'm pretty happy with it, just using the command line client mpc right now. I intend to investigate the mingus emacs client for mpd at some point.

An emerging theme is that m4a on Linux is pain.

UPDATED It turns out that one problem was I needed gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad and gstreamer0.10-plugins-really-bad. The latter comes from debian-multimedia.org, and had a file conflict with the former in Debian unstable (bug #544667 apparently just fixed). Grabbing the version from testing made it work. This fixed at least rhythmbox, exhaile and quodlibet. Thanks to Tim-Philipp Müller for the solution.

I guess the point I missed at first was that so many of the players use gstreamer as a back end, so what looked like many bugs/configuration-problems was really one. Presumably I'd have to go through a similar process to get phonon working for juk.

OK, this is just lame, and I don't mean the software. Following a post by /merrikson/ on amarok forums, I had to edit the mp3 profile in

~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/scripts-data 

so that it read

[Amarok TTMD - mp3]
encode_type=FAAC
extension=m4a
naming_scheme=/tmp/kde-bremner/transkode-%{artist}-%{title}.%{dst_ext}
show=false
switches=-q 100

Now amarok thinks its transcoding files to mp3 for my ipod (why do people want this?) but is really using m4a. I've submitted a feature request to make this less lame.