Issues with sound quality

ggi at st-andrews.ac.uk ggi at st-andrews.ac.uk
Sat Oct 9 12:28:58 UTC 2004


Quoting Jan Schmidt <thaytan at mad.scientist.com>:

> <quote who="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.
> 
> It sounds like a mixer problem - have you tried turning down the PCM and/or
> Master mixer sliders slightly?

Yes, it makes no difference. It isn't that sort of hiss. Muine plays the same
stuff perfectly, at the same volume, presumably by using the alsa device
directly (well, through xine-lib).

ogg123 won't let me use alsa output:

ogg123 -d alsa Music/The\ Bad\ Plus/These\ Are\ the\ Vistas/03\ -\ Smells\ Like\
Teen\ Spirit.ogg
=== No such device alsa.

And presumably it uses OSS output by default, which introduces the crackling and
popping that gstreamer/esd seems to amplify.

Quoting Matt Zimmerman <mdz at canonical.com>:

> It certainly sounds like a hardware issue.  Try playing a .wav file with
> aplay and direct ALSA output as a test.

This works perfectly. Is that what you would expect?

P.S. Sorry to whomever has to check this before posting it to the list. I'm
reluctant to subscribe this account to any mailing lists, and my normal one
doesn't work from the internet connection I'm using. I should get a usable one
soon.

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