Kalarm in Plasma 6

Message

pygoscelis · Post by **pygoscelis** » Fri Sep 20, 2024 5:10 am

kde-apps/kalarm-24.05.2:6::gentoo has lost its ability to play mp3 files. It says "Unsupported audio format, or corrupt data" (and gives a warning sound, so sound by itself is working). It is not corrupt data, it's all mp3s and kde-apps/kalarm-23-whatever worked just fine with these file.

How can I troubleshoot this?

Post by **Banana** » Fri Sep 20, 2024 6:31 am

One way would be to add the mp3 useflag as a global one.

Post by **asturm** » Fri Sep 20, 2024 6:38 am

That version of kalarm is using media-libs/libcanberra for sound output. What are your use flag settings on that?

pygoscelis · Post by **pygoscelis** » Fri Sep 20, 2024 10:22 am

asturm wrote:That version of kalarm is using media-libs/libcanberra for sound output. What are your use flag settings on that?

Hmm... alsa gtk3 pulseaudio udev -gnome -gstreamer -gtk2 -oss -sound -tdb

Edit: I added gstreamer and sound, still no dice. canberra-gtk-play also says data corrupt. Libcanberra is a binary package...

pygoscelis · Post by **pygoscelis** » Fri Sep 20, 2024 9:38 pm

Here's the thing. libcanberra cannot play mp3 at all. It can play wav and ogg files only. It's all in the source code.

libcanberra's last change was 12 years ago. I'd say for a program that is supposed to play sound files it probably wasn't such a great idea to go with this library. It is designed to play sound theme sounds and perhaps it's great for that purpose.

Anyway I transcoded my alarm sounds to Ogg Vorbis and now I can wake up with the Colonel Bogey march played by the Royal Marines orchestra again. Happy days!

Post by **asturm** » Fri Sep 20, 2024 9:40 pm

You'll be then thrilled to know that >=kalarm-24.08.0 was ported away to media-video/vlc for sound playback.

pygoscelis · Post by **pygoscelis** » Fri Sep 20, 2024 9:49 pm

asturm wrote:You'll be then thrilled to know that >=kalarm-24.08.0 was ported away to media-video/vlc for sound playback.

I am! Thanks.