Help! Viridian won't play any music!

Created by Dave Eddy
Keywords:
gstreamer

This can be caused by a number of reasons, but for the most part it is caused by gstreamer-plugins that are required to play music (like codecs) not being available on the system.

If you have just installed Viridian and noticed that an error messages pops up every time you try to load a song, it's most likely caused by the correct codec not being present. To fix this error, on Ubuntu, you can download the codecs by going to Applications -> Software Center. From there you can search for 'gstreamer', and install the 'GStreamer extra plugins'. These codecs will cover the basic music files, however if your Ampache library contains apple m4a (aac) files, you should also install 'GStreamer plugins for aac, xvid, mpeg2, faad'. If you are not using Ubuntu, or just prefer command line, you can also install these plugins/codecs through aptitude (or yum).

If installing the codecs did NOT solve your problem, the next most likely thing causing the errors is the Ampache catalog being out of date in Viridian. This can cause Viridian to think songs/albums/artists are saved on Ampache, when they have actually been deleted from the server. This causes problems when Viridian tries to play a song and the song has been deleted, the server returns an error, and Viridian can't play it. To fix this you can first check to see if the catalog is out of date by going to Edit -> Preferences -> Catalog in Viridian; this will tell you if the catalog is out of sync, up to date, or in an undetermined state (for whatever reason). If it is out of date, you can go to File -> Clear Local Cache to have Viridian re sync it's catalog with the server.