Comment 37 for bug 57789

I'm a lurker on the amarok-devel list upstream, and also follow the Amarok bugs in Ubuntu. I don't actually do Amarok development myself, so take all of this with a grain of salt. It's my understanding of the current situation, and may be incorrect:

Over the past few years I've heard a number of issues with crossfading in 1.4, and the solution is always to disable crossfading. I don't think that a full fix has ever been implemented in 1.4, since there is a complicated inter-relationship with Amarok and the underlying sound engines that actually makes the crossfading work.

Part of the effort of Amarok 2 was to simplify the huge number of configuration issues so that the type of problem we're seeing here can be resolved more easily. Instead of 3 database backends (postgres, MySQL, SQLite), Amarok supports one (MySQLe) and instead of multiple audio backends (xine, gstreamer, pulseaudio, ...), there is one (I think phonon/xine).

Unfortunately, there is no further maintenance of the Amarok 1.4 codebase planned by Amarok upstream. Meaning, no Amarok developers are working on a fix, since they are so busy with what's going on in Amarok 2: already maintaining 2.0.0, getting ready to release 2.1, and planning on which features need to be pushed back for 2.2. In order to get a fix in 1.4, you will either need to personally find someone willing to take a look at the 1.4 codebase again or do it yourself. A bounty would probably help here :)

I hope that clears things up. Let me know if any of that needs clarification.