MP3 and other sound problems

Hey

I just installed SuSE Professional 9.3 from ftp.belnet.be and everything
works well except for some sound stuff. I discovered 2 problems:

* aMSN doesn't seem to be able to produce any sound at all, but gives no
errors and works fine apart from this problem.
* amaroK (music player) doesn't play any mp3 files. It does play wav files
- not always at the right volume though, but I think that's an amaroK
problem - but when I make it play an mp3 it doesn't do anything at all (no
OSD telling which song it is gonna play, and no reaction in the player
window either except from the blinking play button). When started from
Konsole, amaroK gives the following errors:

QObject::connect: Cannot connect Engine::Base::statusText( const QString& )
to (null)::shortMessage( const QString& )
QObject::connect: Cannot connect Engine::Base::infoMessage( const QString&
) to (null)::longMessage( const QString& )
QLayout: Adding KToolBar/mainToolBar (child of QVBox/unnamed) to layout for
PlaylistWindow/PlaylistWindow

and after a while (several times):

QObject::disconnect: Unexpected null parameter
QObject::connect: Cannot connect (null)::activePartChanged( KParts:art *
) to KHTMLPart::slotActiveFrameChanged( KParts:art * )

I know I do have a working mp3 engine installed somewhere since I can play
mp3s with RealPlayer. I told amaroK to use aRts as engine (which i think
aMSN uses too) but when i change this to aKode it still doesn't work.
However, KDE does produce the fancy login and logout sounds and also makes
sounds when displaying error messages (also in amaroK).

Can anyone tell me what's wrong??

Thanks a lot
Pieter

pieternuyts@fastmail.fm adjusted his/her tinfoil beanie to post:

>
> I know I do have a working mp3 engine installed somewhere since I can
> play
> mp3s with RealPlayer.

RealPlayer has it`s own mpg decoder.

Have you done a YOU yet and grabbed the multimedia packages ( all 4 )?

HTH
--
Mark
Twixt hill and high water
N. Wales, UK
Novell Support Forums SysOp

> Have you done a YOU yet and grabbed the multimedia packages ( all 4 )?

Thanks! That solved it!
In fact I could have thought of that myself :-$ but I hadn't noticed these
packages between all the others...

Thanks
Pieter

After all it didn't solve everything, though it's much better already...
AmaroK plays well now (except my sound server crashed when I was away, I
hope it won't happen again...) and amsn plays sounds as long as amaroK
isn't playing, but seems to have troubles when I'm playing music.

The sound command in aMSN's prefs is set to play $sound. I tried setting
it to artsdsp play $sound (which was posted by someone on another site) but
this doesn't work: artsdsp says it only works with binaries, and play
appears to be a script...

Could anyone help me with this?

(I considered writing a C-program calling play and compiling this to a
binary, but this seems too simple to me :-D and anyway my C skills aren't
great so if one of you knows it won't work I don't have to do all the
searching work...)

Thanks
Pieter