[4754] in testers
9.0.6: Sound-related issues
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Tue Jun 12 06:57:50 2001
Message-Id: <200106121057.GAA06665@space-invaders.mit.edu>
To: testers@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 06:57:43 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
I played around a lot with sound today in 9.0.6 to see what would
break under real-world conditions. There were a number of issues.
Unless otherwise noted, tested with a clean (from /usr/prototype_user)
set of dotfiles in the gu account.
--- GENERAL ---
- Multimedia: Audio / CD Players / XPlayCD (Linux)
is missing from the menus.
- Multimedia: Audio / MP3 Players / mpg123 has the wrong icon; it's
an info page.
Volume controls worked passably.
--- space-invaders IRIX 9.0.6 ---
IRIX RealPlayer 7.0.3.286 fails to play NPR hourly stream due to
missing components. 8.0.3.412 succeeds both with and without esd
verified running. (tested as beland)
space-invaders (as beland) with RealPlayer 7.0.3.286:
(0:53 ~) beland@space-invaders: add infoagents
(0:53 ~) beland@space-invaders: realplay /tmp/shoutcast-playlist.pls
[long pause and lots of thrashing...]
00:54 Jun 12 00:54:31 1A:space-invaders unix: |$(0x6da)ALERT: Process [realplay] pid 3553 killed: process or stack limit exceeded
00:54 [ESP System Information Notification]:"ALERT: Process [realplay] pid 3553 killed: process or stack limit exceeded"
Version 8.0.3.412 works fine with this.
(same things happens with mp3 files)
mpg123 works OK (tested as beland)
---gyruss Solaris 9.0.6---
- mpg123 changes the name of the terminal window to the name of the
mp3, but doesn't change it back when its done. (Under Linux, it
doesn't change at all.)
- Chosing Multimedia: Audio / Volume / Audiocontrol (Suns) from the
menu caused a white dialog box to pop up:
The OpenWindows environment may no longer be supported in a future
release. You may want to migrate to CDE, the Common Desktop
Environment.
[ ] Check here to disable this message.
I clicked the Continue button, and tasklist crashed. Tasklist also
crashed when I closed audiocontrol. I started audiocontrol again,
but no dialog box appeared. Tasklist crashed again when I closed
audio control. For the moment, there's a corefile at
/mit/gu/tasklist.audioconvert.core, but it seems to be easily
reproducable.
- Realplayer 7 asks me to complete a registration form when I first
start it up.
- Realaudio 7 crashes on shutdown after I hit "stop". It didn't
leave a corefile.
- Realaudio 7 works with esd OK.
- Realaudio 8 works with esd OK.
01:17 Initializing settings...
01:17 esd: Esound sound daemon already running or stale UNIX socket
01:17 /tmp/.esd/socket
01:17 This socket already exists indicating esd is already running.
01:17 Exiting...
mpg123 doesn't work under these conditions
realplay doesn't work under these conditions
So far, this is a known problem. But..if one user starts esd on their
own, the next user will not be able to gain ownership of /tmp, and
thus will fail to be able to run esd, probably messing up the sound
system. A workaround is to delete /tmp/esd and start esd yourself,
but then this messes up the system for the next user. But maybe the
larger fix will also solve the problem of users starting esd on their
own.
With esd running properly, realplay 7.0.3.338 and 8.0.3.421 work "out
of the box" on dig-dug, but apparently not when esd is running (tested
as beland). However, they can made to work if the user goes to View
(menu) -> Preferences (menu item) -> Performance (tab). Under "Audio
Driver Options, select "ESound Support (LInux only, ESD must be
running)". Unfortunately, the quality of the output suffers badly if
you do this.
- The main volume knob in xmixer doesn't seem to do anything (tested
with realplay and mpg123) ; the same knob in aumix doesn't do
anything either, though.
---
Overall audio recommendations:
I recommend system-wide third-party software upgrade to RealPlayer 8 -
no obvious differences for Linux, Solaris users, but IRIX users avoid
nasty crashes.
I'm split of ESD. It is nice to have more than one app able to play
at once, but I haven't been able to take advantage of that with the
apps we have, and it messes up audio quality in some apps. It also
seems to break some others, like ViaVoice, which I use at home.
Personally, I've turned off esd for my login, and my life is a happier
place.
===============================================================
Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
MIT STS/Course 6 (EECS) - MIT Athena User Interface Project
===============================================================
