Arch Linux

wriggary

Member

Registered: 2009-06-30

Posts: 65

audacious2 sounds off key.

Well, here it goes.  Managed to install, configure, troubleshoot, and enjoy Arch on two machines without even posting a question to the forum.  Well, I did fire up links and post a comment in the "why arch is the best" thread, during the first install.  But otherwise, searching the forum and wiki has done me good. 

I had been searching for a winamp-2.x like music player for a while.  Something that could sit on top of all windows and not get in the way.  I had tried audacious once before, but it must have been off the 1.x version, the interface looked way worse than it does now.

Anyway, play a few old mp3s from my collection, and I'm noticing that it seems to play songs modulated slightly lower... about three steps.  The timing sounds right.  And, from comparing time remaining to a stopwatch, the song is progressing normally with no cutoff on the end.

So I fire up quodlibet and audacious2 at the same time, and tried playing a song I knew by heart (Moby - Run on) from radio play, owning the cd, wearing out the cd, buying the cd again, ripping it, and listening to the mp3 on win2k, XP, vista, ubuntu, and now archlinux.  I could definitely hear the disharmony, especially in the piano part at the beginning.  It sounded like someone was sitting beside and playing a note and a half flat.  And when i stopped audacious?  it stopped as well.

So, it appears that gstreamer based apps are working well (I have rhythmbox and quodlibet installed) and sound just fine.  But audacious just uses libmad itself, rather than mess with gstreamer.  I checked the settings on audacious; made sure alsa was selected, increased the buffer, disabled the replaygain, disabled the equalizer, and no change.  I also checked the settings for the libmad plugin (which there aren't many,) and they appear to be in order, and the libmad it was compiled against (libmad-0.15.1 (beta)) matches what is installed on my system (0.15.1b-4).

So, my question.  Anybody else notice that audacious sounds wrong? or is it just me? (especially curious about i686, if its a compilation error or really a bug in the program itself)

Thanks
Gary

uname -a:

 Linux leviathon 2.6.30-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Aug 17 16:06:45 CEST 2009 x86_64 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

$ pacman -Qi libmad
Name           : libmad
Version        : 0.15.1b-4
URL            : http://www.underbit.com/products/mad/
Licenses       : GPL  
Groups         : None
Provides       : None
Depends On     : glibc  
Optional Deps  : None
Required By    : audacious-plugins  cdrdao  cmus  gstreamer0.10-ugly-plugins  
                 vlc  
Conflicts With : mad  
Replaces       : mad  
Installed Size : 312.00 K
Packager       : Giovanni Scafora <giovanni@archlinux.org>
Architecture   : x86_64
Build Date     : Sat 28 Feb 2009 03:25:45 AM MST
Install Date   : Sat 01 Aug 2009 04:15:00 AM MDT
Install Reason : Installed as a dependency for another package
Install Script : No
Description    : A high-quality MPEG audio decoder

$ pacman -Qi audacious
Name           : audacious
Version        : 2.1-1
URL            : http://audacious-media-player.org/
Licenses       : GPL3  
Groups         : None
Provides       : audacious-player  
Depends On     : gtk2  libmcs  dbus-glib  libsamplerate  libxml2  
                 desktop-file-utils  audacious-plugins  
Optional Deps  : unzip: Zipped skins support
Required By    : None
Conflicts With : None
Replaces       : audacious-player  
Installed Size : 3700.00 K
Packager       : Eric Belanger <eric@archlinux.org>
Architecture   : x86_64
Build Date     : Sun 12 Jul 2009 04:59:54 PM MDT
Install Date   : Mon 31 Aug 2009 05:54:46 PM MDT
Install Reason : Explicitly installed
Install Script : Yes
Description    : Media player based on BMP