On Tue, 18 May 2010 16:51:40 +0100 Simon Royal simonroyal@live.co.uk wrote:
Hi I am still battling with sound on my ThinkPad 600 running Xubuntu. I have managed to get some sound and even play MP3 via command line - mpg123 and mplayer. But I cannot get any program to play it. It either doesnt play at all or plays so crackly you cant even hear the music. Is this a hardware limitation or am I doing something wrong? Please help, I am a fairly new Linux user. When using mplayer via command line I noticed that it said 'pulse' is this the audio output engine/settings it is using as under Mixer there is also a mention of Pulse under one of the Output options - along sine OSS and Alsa. Your help would be greatly appreciated.
Pulse refers to PulseAudio which enables sound from local and remote applications to be mixed together and then output (ALSA dmix can do the local mixing bit).
My suspicion is that with the GUI applications there is more happening and somethimes the MP3 decoder thread doesn't get the CPU often enough to be able to keep up with the output.
Sometimes this can be fixed by:
1. Giving a higher (sometimes even real time) priority to the decoder thread. 2. Having a little more buffering between the decoder and the output - this means there is more time between when the decoder can run (because there is space in the output buffer) and when it must run (because the output buffer is getting empty).
How to configure anything like that would depend on what GUI applications you are using and what media framework they use (e.g gstreamer, xine, vlc).
HTH, Steve.