Friday, September 12, 2008

Amarok 2 now operating in OS X

Yes, I finally got it working but not without some problems and some operational difficulties. Nevertheless, it is a huge step forward.
Yesterday, I had run into a problem with this guide as it asked for the xine-lib port file to be modified before installing. As a result it didn't install at all.
Today, I downloaded and installed Darwin ports and did the exact same
sudo port -d selfupdate # Didn't use the -d switch yesterday but this guide uses sudo.
Actually, it seems that Darwin ports and Macports are exactly the same.
In any event, without changing the port file at all, xine-lib compiled and installed without problem using

sudo port install xine-lib

I then ran into a problem with the Pre KDE requisites as neither Subversion, JPEG nor LIBMNG installed from ports.
I later got Subversion from here but despite several attempts I was unable to get either JPEG or LIBMNG installed so I went ahead without them.
So now I started compiling. It seemed to be going fine, but then after more than an hour, I got a message saying that I was about to run out of disk space. This is despite having had about 5 GB available at the start.
So, I ctrl-c'ed out, deleted iTunes Music (seems that iTunes actually copies the music which leads to a major duplication and unnecessary loss of disk space), KDE4 and Amarok stuff from the aborted install of Amarok 2.
Then I downloaded the Amarok2.dmg that I was pointed to in this thread and is available here.
This installed without problem and I was very quickly able to get Amarok 2 operating within OS X.
Importing my music collection was easy but two problems showed up:
1. Only .mp3 files play in Amarok 2 in OS X. No luck with .wma files despite the fact that Plex plays them without problem in OS X. So, I downloaded Flip4Mac from here but it made no difference. I posted in the same thread about this.
2. Other problem is that despite checking Last.FM in the Amarok Internet Preferences, no last.fm appears when I click the Internet tab (although everything else does). This really does sound like a bug.

1 comment:

  1. Although Flip4Mac is pretty good for WMV (and wma) content, there are plenty of weird codecs floating about which aren't compatible. That seems to be what's going on with the wma stuff.
    BTW, you can set your iTunes prefs to "not" copy files.

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