How to enable MP3, M4a support for Amarok?

Question

How to enable MP3, M4A support for Amarok? I am using the following:

• Amarok Version 2.0.1
• KDE 4.1.3
• openSUSE 11.1

Answer 1

Have you tried the codec pack?

According to this site it should solve your problem.

Answer 2

I know this is an old post, but here it is September 2019 (Amarok v. 2.9.0) and just when I think I've got it all documented, it is still a struggle to get Amarok working with my m4a files on my new Fedora 30 build. This time, the main clue was here: https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-mpeg-4-aac-decoder-for-centos-7-linux . What got it working for me was:

dnf install gstreamer{,1}-plugins-ugly gstreamer-plugins-bad-nonfree gstreamer1-plugins-bad-freeworld

Also, I had installed this previously. I'm not sure if they contributed to the success- it didn't work until the above dnf- but I installed it:

go to https://rpmfusion.org/Configuration, download the RPM Fusion Free and NonFree rpms. Install them using dnf.
dnf install python-devel ffmpeg-libs SDL2-devel SDL2_image-devel SDL2_mixer-devel SDL2_ttf-devel portmidi-devel libavdevice libavc1394-devel zlibrary-devel ccache
dnf install ffmpeg-libs, libavdevice

Afterwards, dnf install amarok and attempt to play an M4A file.

When I run Amarok from the command line, I see warnings e.g.,

amarok(5097)/phonon (KDE plugin): Can not create backend object from factory for  "GStreamer" ,  "phonon_gstreamer" :

That seems to be a red herring.

BTW, Amarok seemed to be able to play MP3 files out of the box. However, I had installed ffmpeg-libs, libavdevice, and libavc1394-devel prior to Amarok. So I don't know if they or one of their dependencies was what did the trick.