I’ve been playing around with Amarok the last couple of days as well. When I saw a friend with an ipod who had the lyrics also downloaded with the songs, I started salivating and of course went off to check what would work with an ipod off an ubuntu installation.

Dapper Drake seems to have the 1.3.9 version of Amarok installed, so after a little poking around, I added the following

deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/amarok-142 dapper main

to my /etc/apt/sources.list file. Going back to the Synaptic Package Manager, it now lists Amarok 1.4.2 for an update. So I updated that, and went back to my playlists.

But nothing plays! All it says is “No Audio Channel” …!

After a little more digging around, I find out that for some reason libxine 1.1.1 broke support of playing FLAC files. This was, of course, the format I’d chosen to copy my CD’s over into my computer. It’s been fixed in 1.1.2, but 1.1.1 is the version in Dapper Drake (I do not know what plans are for fixing this in the 6.0.6 release: this one certainly seems to mandate a backport for functionality). In any case, following instructions on this page and snagging this patch as given by the user “Ivo Man” resolved this little problem.

And now I’m happily listening to my playlists. I even hooked up a pair of speakers to my laptop!