[linux-audio-user] gstreamer, rhythmbox, and mp3

carmen _ at whats-your.name
Mon Feb 5 16:41:23 EST 2007


On Mon Feb 05, 2007 at 01:59:29PM -0600, Victor Roetman wrote:
> I've been using rhythmbox for listening to my mp3 files on my Ubuntu
> laptop.  Mostly this was because it supports daap sharing, and gives me

> I seem to get some minor distortion, and some pops and cracks when
> playing a lot of my mp3 files.  I took one especially problematic file
> 
> Banshee, I've noticed, does the same thing.
> 
> mpg123 and mpg321 seem to have no problems.  xine engine of amarok seems
> to work.
> 
> Has anyone else noticed anything like this?  Is this a problem with
> gstreamer in general?

i guess you could say its a design issue inherent to all of these 'abstract away all the native APIs' things - theres more parts that can malfunction

i think youre one of the lucky ones. in general, rhythmbox cant even properly skip through a file for me, using its seekbar. its even worse with DAAP - clicking on the seekbar usually skips it to the next file oer freezes up the app entirely (the same mt-daapd works fine with iTunes on the same PC booted into XP). quodlibet refuses to put FLACs in its supported format list, and using the gstreamer JACK sink to play mp3s, sent its CPU usage to 94%, with lots of skips. its also really slow to startup (about as slow as amarok which needs to launch 5 or 6 kde daemons so that the file-pane works or something)

amarok is a similar story. they removed the gstreamer sink, or at least made it really hard to enable it, leaving one only with XINE. with XINE, if you play FLACs, theres tons of dropouts, if you use the jack sink. if you use the alsa sink, theres no dropouts. but then you are using jackplug, which is more prone to freezes/dropouts itself. generlaly amarok freezes after every 3 tracks here, so ive given up on it as well.

banshee is even worse, generally freezing up while populating the library, let alone playing a track. but then amarok freezes populating the library until i move utf-8/shift-jis dirs out of the music directory as well..

audacious has a tendency to leave ghosted jack clients (i think it uses some really old bio2jack code that they dont bother updating much), and it doesnt have a library anyways.


ive resorted to just using mplayer for everything. and a bash alias to regenerate the 'library' with gnu find. its simply the only player that is anywhere near stable, dropout/glitch-free playback with JACK.  it still freezes up on 0 byte files that rtorrent recreated after i deleted their directory..but that pales in comparison to trying to get a XINE or GST player to work right..

>  What's going on here?  What's with the levels
> that it would clip when it's not even loud?
> 
> (and I really wish there was a jack backend for gstreamer)

there is. it didnt work very well for me (worse than alsa+plug:jack, just like XINE) but you might want to give it a shot

> 
> Any comments, suggestions?  Does anyone here follow gstreamer at all?
> 
> 
> -- 
> -= =- vroetman at myrealbox.com -= =-
> 



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