Hi, I’m trying out Amarok v3.1.1 on Arch Linux (installed from the Arch User Repository), though I’ve replicated this by building and installing from the Amarok source on Gitlab as well.
If I select Settings in the Menubar, then Replay Gain Mode, the only available option is “Off”, “Track” and “Album” are greyed out and not selectable. I have libreplaygain installed, though it doesn’t seem to be a dependency for Amarok, and none of the dependencies listed in the Readme on the KDE Gitlab (sorry, I can’t include links) seem to relate to ReplayGain, so I’m not sure what I’m missing.
If I install the flatpak version of Amarok, these settings are selectable, so I have to wonder if I’m missing an optional dependency on my system that’s perhaps not listed in the Readme. Has anyone else run into this issue?
I think it’s a Phonon thing (though I guess @mazoon could confirm or contradict that assessment).
As far as I recall, the Flatpak version uses gstreamer as a backend, while the one in the AUR defaults to VLC, which don’t support the same subsets of features, and each have their bugs (e.g VLC doesn’t support the analyzer widget, while gstreamer will just stop playing randomly on my machine).
You can configure which backend you use (mpv or VLC) if you’re on the AUR version using a phononsetting, and AFAIK it’s not possible with the Flatpak.
Since Phonon is kind of abandonware these days (it was one of the “Pillars of KDE” during the Qt4 days, and got superseded by QtMultimedia with Qt5), I think the best way forward for Amarok would be to drop it and replace it directly with, libmpv (my preffered media player engine) or libvlc (not very good, but acceptable).
Thanks @Guava5, that was it. I installed the Phonon mpv and gstreamer packages from the AUR and played around with the phononsettings app. It seems like gstreamer is what unlocks the ReplayGain settings for me. I’ll have to tinker with this and see what I think. I appreciate your help!
@skyfishgoo, appreciate the reply. I think this is a bit unrelated to the Amarok issue, but I do want to say that I’ve been using rsgain for applying ReplayGain for a while and it works great! I would recommend it too.
Yes, indeed, ReplayGain is only supported with phonon-gstreamer backend, which is not maintained any more and has been dropped by many distributions. If anyone is interested in deeper technical aspects, I’ve gathered some audio backend notes to a GitHub issue: Audio playback system rework (#11) · Issues · Multimedia / Amarok · GitLab