I have just installed 11.4 64bit and duly followed the guide for getting the required multimedia files installed.
I find I have a problem with playing audio cd’s the only program which will play an audio cd is Kaffeine but it does not play properly - it plays a few bars then silence, plays a few bars then silence and I can find no way of getting it to play without interruption. There are no sound problems with Kaffene when using it to play digital tv or dvd films.
I have tried KsCD, Amarok, Mplayer, SMPlayer, and GNOME MPlayer none of which can I get to play a CD. With Amarok there does not appear to be a setting to play a CD as soon as it is put in the drive it would appear that you have to generate a playlist first, I can show the list of tunes on the CD but that’s a far as it goes they will not add to a playlist or play.
Please can anyone suggest what may be wrong or point me in the direction of a solution?
If there is any specific information I need to provide please let me know.
Have just found the player Clementine which apparently is based on Amarok. Although not providing a direct play facility I was able to load the cd to the playlist then play the tunes. This may be a clue to my problems in that I noticed that it had to mount the player first. Is there a setting for auto mounting?
I had a similar problem that was sorted out when the codec pack was installed but amarok insisted on generating a play list first which took some time. It also searched the web for info etc. In the past I have just put the cd in which is full of mp3’s and it just played. I usually used kaffeine as I don’t like amarok.
One problem was the initial 11.4 install. It correctly picked up my 2 audio channels but also found 5 others that don’t exist. These can be seen in phonon in system settings which I feel should really be called kcontrol. Some stuff was also muted by default. The phantom channels were fixed by the method I used to install the codecs on 64bit. I wouldn’t advise using the method I used for that so it would be best to ask about that separately if you find you have a number of audio channels that aren’t really there. Prior to this the symptoms were the same as the ones you have.
If anyone knows of a player that just plays I would be interested in knowing which one it is. Amarok to me has too much bloat.
You can always try to configure Phonom to use another backend, there are at least 3 available if the correct packages are available (gstreamer, xine and vlc).