Re: Songs glitching over samba

On Wed, 11 May 2005, Adam M wrote:

> On 5/9/05, Brandon Kuczenski <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On Mon, 9 May 2005, [ISO-8859-1] Håvard Kvålen wrote:
>>
>>> On Sun, 8 May 2005, Brandon Kuczenski wrote:
>>>
>>>> When I play these songs, I get glitches every 10-20 seconds: the playback
>>>> pauses for a fraction of a second, just long enough to become very
>>>> annoying after a minute or so.  The glitches correspond in time with the
>>>> network-activity light flashing on my wireless card.
>
>> Any ideas what I can look at in terms of sound card / network card
>> interactions?  it seems like it's the job of the audio application to
>> insulate itself from network problems, not vice versa -- and the network
>> is generally of high reliability.
>
> There are three possibilities.
>
> 1. Debian XMMS you are using has a bunch of patches from Gentoo and
> other places. Some of the patches *could* be causing this problem to
> show up.
>
> 2. Samba is a high latency file system. I do not think XMMS prebuffers
> anything (at least it shouldn't) when it reads from the file system.
> After all, the file system *is* a buffer!
>
> 3. I always stream my music from my gnump3d server and I have noticed
> that when other applications are doing a lot of repainting (for
> example, when I switch workspaces), sometimes the output on Alsa does
> stop momentarily. This is NOT frequent.
>
> Anyway, I really think this is related to #2. If you streamed, you
> might not have this problem. The XMMS in Debian allows you to set
> position in the stream, just like WinAmp or if you were using a local
> file.

I will try building a fresh (non-Debianized) XMMS from source.  I 
will also look into gnump3d.  In the meantime, do you (or the other XMMS 
developers) think it would be simple or reasonable to add some [optional] 
pre-buffering in the case of playback off networked file systems?  The 
buffer would not have to store much data -- only a few hundred kilobytes 
-- to fully insulate it from even frequent network unreliabilities.

An earlier poster mentioned a "network card / sound card interaction..." 
but I think that XMMS *is* the network card/sound card interaction.  I 
believe the player is the right place to fix this problem.  But I'm not 
much of an application programmer so maybe there are other concerns...

-Brandon

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