Bug#247818: rhythmbox skips mp3 when using alsa with snd-via82xx

[Andreas Bombe]

On Fri, May 07, 2004 at 12:05:53PM +0300, Vaidotas Zemlys wrote:
> Rhythmbox does not play mp3 normally with alsa, the sound skips.  It
> uses about 20% of CPU, when playing and if you do something intensive
> you can't listen to music at all.

I have experienced this.  It's independent of the type of music played
(file or web stream, mp3 or Vorbis) and causes the sound to cut out for
a few seconds whenever there is some CPU load.

This is a problem of the gstreamer alsasink, which I heard wasn't
properly maintained and is problematic.  The same skips occur when
playing a file directly through a gstreamer pipeline:

  gst-launch-0.8 filesrc location=music.ogg ! spider ! alsasink

Playing through osssink and the OSS emulation of ALSA is unproblematic.

>                                   This does not happen with Totem, Beep
> Media player and alsaplayer. And it does not happen with Rhythmbox when
> oss drivers are used. Changing audiosink from osssink to alsasink and
> vice versa does not have any effect. 

It does, you probably didn't actually change the audiosink as you
thought.  It's a bit tricky: The gstreamer-properties program changes
the settings for gstreamer 0.6 only.  The current Rhythmbox uses
gstreamer 0.8.  You have to run gconf-editor and change
/system/gstreamer/0.8/default/audiosink to ossink.


The maintainers of Rhythmbox may want to:
1) reassign this bug to gstreamer0.8-alsa
2) note that skips are likely fault of alsasink
3) note that gstreamer-properties is misleading as it doesn't handle
   gstreamer 0.8 and gconf-editor use is required

-- 
Andreas Bombe <bombe@informatik.tu-muenchen.de>    GPG key 0x04880A44