Sound in Amarok 2.0.2 and Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04

I really like Amarok, but apparently in Ubuntu 9.04 Gnome as a Desktop, when installing amarok it does not play sound at all. After some investigation, apparently amarok uses Phonon and you need to make sure you have the xine phonon backend. But that apparently is not enough. Installing xine-console solves the problem. I’ve read that installing xine-ui solves the problem as well.

Although I love the simplicity of Gnome, there are some Kde applications that simply rock, name it:

• Amarok
• Kile
• and Kopete, that apparently it has video built in, something that pidgin has not yet.

Yes, you can have Gnome Desktop and use Kde applications.

libmtp and Ubuntu Jaunty (mtp devices), Rhythmbox

LIBMTP and UBUNTU JAUNTY

I installed a clean ubuntu Jaunty 64 bit, and when plugging in an mp3 player I found that Rhythmbox could not found my player because of an libmtp panic error, sth like this:

PTP: Opening session
LIBMTP PANIC: Unable to read device information on device 6 on bus 0, trying to continue

Apparently there is a bug already in launchpad:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/348287

I found out that Jaunty uses 0.3.0 of libmtp which dates back from 2008.

Seeing that this is quite annoying, I downloaded the latest libmtp and compiled them by hand:

You’ll need libusb-dev library (apt-get install libusb-dev), which can be installed by means of apt-get.

Latest release of libmtp:

http://libmtp.sourceforge.net/index.php The latest is 0.3.6

as always:

./configure

make

sudo make install

By default, this installs:

:/usr/local/lib$ ls -l

-rw-r–r– 1 root root 839976 2009-05-04 18:46 libmtp.a

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 805 2009-05-04 18:46 libmtp.la

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 2009-05-04 18:46 libmtp.so -> libmtp.so.8.2.1

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 2009-05-04 18:46 libmtp.so.8 -> libmtp.so.8.2.1

the libmtps that come in Jaunty are in /usr/lib:

/usr/lib/libmtp.so.8

/usr/lib/libmtp.so.8.0.0

back these files up in some place in your home:

Remove those in /usr/lib and soft link to new ones:

If you are still in /usr/lib

ln -s /usr/local/lib/libmtp.so.8.2.1 libmtp.so.8

ln -s /usr/local/lib/libmtp.so.8.2.1 libmtp.so.8.0.0

Of course, you need to be root for that.

That’s it!! If you plug your mp3 and start Rhythmbox, it should work.