Issues with sound quality

[ggi at st-andrews.ac.uk]

I mentioned this on #ubuntu-devel, but it appeared to go unacknowledged.
Basically, Rhythmbox introduces nasty (occasional) hissing when playing
music. Of course, this isn't the fault of Rhythmbox. I remember a
gstreamer problem I had on Debian a while ago that caused similar, if
not identical, behaviour. I believe that was fixed though. Listening to
the esd output test in gstreamer-properties the hissing and such can be
heard quite clearly.

I have no problems playing music in Muine. Well, almost no problems. It
worked fine, until I tested ogg123, which produced slightly less hissing
than gstreamer, and more crackling and popping. This is still pretty
odd, as I would expect ogg123 to play a file perfectly. Presumably
ogg123 is using OSS output. ALSA output doesn't seem to work (in ogg123
or gstreamer, even with esd disabled). Anyway, after testing ogg123, the
crackling/hissing starts in Muine. Very odd. It doesn't seem to be a
hardware issue. Is this a known problem with gstreamer/esd?

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