Note: This post has been updated in several places. Those updates are denoted by starting with “UPDATE”. Some smaller updates are not denoted in this manner.

This is a tale of my own mistake; because this is the sort of tale that I have plenty of lying around, and because I think that people enjoy laughing at me.

So, anyway, I was experimenting with the KDE 4.2 beta, and checking out how Amarok music player was going. Before, I have hated the new Amarok. The user interface, a departure from what Amarok used to be, seemed unnatural to me. Besides, I couldn’t figure out how to get the darn piece of software to play music anyway. “Amarok Nightly, and the entire 2.x series of Amarok for that matter, was useless to me, and I would never adopt it,” I told myself. “Dumb, buggy Amarok betas are not worth my time. I should just use Exaile.”

I hate being wrong.

It turns out that the reason that Amarok 2 didn’t play my music was because I did not install the MP3¹ support².

After finding that the music now worked in Amarok2, the user interface magically seemed to make more sense, as if the disappeared frustration allowed me to see the good parts of the new Amarok. “Amarok 2 is certainly more pleasing than Amarok 1!” I told myself now.

Click post to view image in full-size.

By the way, I encourage you to check out KDE 4.2 betas, they work amazingly well³.

The lesson I learned? Never lose faith in KDE developers; they always pull through for you. UPDATE: A more relevant lesson to learn would be that one should check if the problem is i the chair before blaming the code.

¹As an open source enthusiast, it would make sense for me to have my music in OGG Vorbis format, but I gave up on that when I discovered that while using Rockbox enables me to play OGG Vorbis files, I still couldn’t play the OGG Vorbis files on unconfigured Windows and Mac installs.

²I had installed the MP3 support by playing the MP3 file in Amarok 1.4, and then clicking the dialog that will autoinstall the MP3 support. UPDATE: I used the Amarok 1.4 MP3 codec installer because I had already assumed that I had the correct files.

³How well the KDE 4.2 nightlies work for you may depend on your hardware and when exactly you try the betas out.