[LAU] KDE4 observations + an easy question

[jedd]

 Hi Danny,

> Phonon generaly works better on top of libxine than gstreamer.... I
> am on Kubuntu here and KDE4 Is working quite well - though amarok can
> be a bit of a pig on the realtime kernel.

 Ah, yeah - forgot to mention that I'd gotten a hint about using
 the xine backend from a guy on the Debian-KDE list - it cured a bunch
 of problems for me.  I think a lot of distros give you gstreamer
 backend by default, which is odd given the upstream problems are
 seemingly well known.

 I'm still not sure what I'm doing with alsa/jack/phonon (if I use
 jack, I have to start it early, and reconfig amarok away from
 alsa, but then I get pauses in audio playback - about 0.3s every
 4s or so - and this is on a 2GB quad-core that's not doing a
 heck of a lot!)

> The best tool of for doing that sort of thing that I can think of is
> sonic visualizer.

 Looks great - and GPL too (I'm always initially dubious if apt-cache
 doesn't know about an application ;)   Downloading it now - thanks
 for the pointer.

 Jedd.