Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 43402
xmms and mpg123 on RH7.1 are have some problems...
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:00 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.08 [en] (WinNT; U ;Nav) Description of problem: I have a Duron 600MHz + AZ11e (KT133 chipset) motherboard, with onboard ac97 codec audio, an ati xpert 98 pci vide card and 64MB Ram. I find that in RH7.1, xmms and mpg123 both produce a chirpy audio output. How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Get the same hardware setup as I do. Duron600MHz, FIC AZ11e motherboard, onboard sound. 2. Just try playing any wav/mp3/ogg file. Actual Results: The output would be chirpy. Expected Results: The output should clean. w/o the chirp. Additional info: When I try freeamp on the same setup, it works flawlessly. Same with "dd if=raw_pcm_data.bin of=/dev/dsp bs=512 count=102400". Its only the xmms and mpg123 that seem to be broken.
If you use the OSS plugin for xmms instead of ESD, does it make any difference?
I too experienced audio distortion with xmms 1.2.4-13. The distortion seemed to occur on MP3s that were sampled at 48KHz, the 44KHz MP3 files sound fine. It seems to be something with Release 13 of 1.2.4. I downloaded 1.2.4-1 from the xmms website, and this resolved my issue. This problem occured on two different machines both running 7.1, one with a Diamond MonsterSound MX300 (Aureal Vortex 2) and the other with a Creative Sound Blaster Live! Installing 1.2.4-1 resolved the issue on both machines. Gavin
Did you check to see output plugin you were using in both cases? The two RPMs default to using different ones (ESD vs. OSS)...
No I did not. I will upgrade to release 13 later this afternoon and try again. I will let you know the results. Gavin
Ok, I was a little curious myself. I upgraded back to release 13 and it appears the OSS Driver 1.2.4 [libOSS.so] works fine. When I switch to eSound Output Plugin 1.2.4 [libesdout.so] the sound is very distorted (metallic sounding). Again, it is not on all MP3 files. Seems to happen on 128 Kbps/48 KHz. Please let me know if you require further information. Thanks, Gavin
OK, so it appears esd is downsampling 48kHz to 44kHz, and doing it rather badly.
I tried mpg123 on the following hardware: - Pentium 200MMX with SB AWE64 ISA PnP - Pentium 100 with SB compatible soundcard - Duron 750 (I don't remember the soundcard) - Also try an old Pentium 75 TOSHIBA laptop (with OSS AudioDrive built-in soundchip) :) I encounter the same problem with the 4 machines desbribed above. I don't know if this can help.
Also xmms seems *very* sluggish on my Duron 600MHz+64MB+AZ11e box. I tried changing the playback rate to 48khz and it started playing OK. But every 4-5 seconds the (analyser) display would freeze for 1-2 seconds. If I try to move the xmms window around, then it gets stuck somewhere in between for 1-2 seconds.
In general, to fix this sort of behavior, switching to the OSS plugin should work. Assigning to esound; its resampling needs fixed, somehow.
I have some similar experiences : I have distorted sound when using esd based programs on a RH 7.1/i386 system. It is like some noise is mixed with the sound. play some.wav -> OK esdplay some.wav -> noise some.wav is stereo 16 bit , 44100 kHz Upgrading to kernel 2.4.3-12.i686 did not help. But if I run the esd demon by hand and then while it is running I run esdplay, then it plays without distortions. If I stop esd and play again ( in this case esdplay autospawns the esd server ) then it is again noisy. Might be related to bug 37078 Hardware : MSI K7T Pro2A motherboard ( KT133 + 686B ) Duron 700 256 MB ram Software : Redhat Linux 7.1
I did too have similar problems with my ac97. I bought (it is not expensive) the OSS driver from www.4front-tech.com. That solved the problem for me. Now, esound works for me Looks like a compatibilty issue between the OSS/Free driver and esound ?
esound just has issues, not planning to fix them anytime soon (since I happen to be upstream esound non-maintainer, there's no hope from that area for now). If someone is interested in working on a patch, I'd be happy to try to help. Otherwise, the accepted solution seems to be using the OSS plugin for xmms (which, given the hardware mixing capabilities of modern sound cards, would be an increasingly good idea even if esound worked perfectly).