[Bug 85791] when sound hardware fails, amarok locks the computer trying to play all songs in playlist

[Bogdan Butnaru]

Public bug reported:

Binary package hint: amarok

This is rather unpleasant issue.

I'm having some problems with pulseaudio, which means that occasionally
the sound hardware goes down and Amarok receives an error from Xine.
This is not Amarok's fault. The problem is that when that happens,
Amarok displays a warning message, but instead of stopping it keeps
trying to play each track in the playlist in turn.

Each time a track starts playing Amarok hogs the processor -- I assume
it starts building the 'track info' panel and even decoding the file
before it notices the sound doesn't work. So it moves to the next file
and again hogs the processor. The result is that (a) nothing works on my
computer anymore until it finishes the playlist and (b) I can't turn
Amarok off until it finishes the playlist (because it didn't allow me to
press any buttons, and I couldn't even start a terminal or switch to a
console; and it was a looong playlist). I suppose if I had auto-repeat
on I would need to restart the computer. This is double-weird as I have
a Core Duo processor and low-latency kernel...

Note that I have had the same problem with Amarok with different causes
(i.e., external drive failed, etc). So I see it as a general issue,
rather than just the 'sound hardware doesn't work'.

I think Amarok should stop trying to play things automatically when it
detects the same error consecutively for a few times, until it receives
user direction.

Also, this is a bit of an Ubuntu problem too, as it amounts to a nice
denial of service technique. Would it be possible to dynamically nice a
normal-priority process that has been using up 90% of the processor for
the last second or so? (Excepting, perhaps, root processes and maybe
higher-than-normal priority processes.) The point is, you should be able
to at least move to a console and start a terminal to kill an aberrant
process.

** Affects: amarok (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: Unconfirmed

-- 
when sound hardware fails, amarok locks the computer trying to play all songs in playlist
https://launchpad.net/bugs/85791