[Lancaster] Help needed with playing CDs under Debian Lenny

[Martyn Welch]

On Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:46:05 +0000, Ken Hough <kenhough at btinternet.com>
wrote:
> All seems to be working well, except for playing CDs.
> 
> Under CD Player v2.0.0 and under Sound Juicer v2.22.0, I get approx 1
> second 
> breaks in sound output. The drive LED indicates that data is being read
> for 
> periods of approx 10 seconds with breaks of about the same period. It
> looks 
> like a lot of data is being read in and is being buffered, but that
there
> is 
> a gap between the buffer becoming  empty and new data being read in.
> 

Don't suppose the system messages ("dmesg" from a terminal, there's
probably a GUI for it as well) show any messages when your trying to play
the CD?

> The drive is OK (see below). I have used this machine before (under win
XP
> and 
> SUSE Linux) without trouble. The usual appearance of the drive LED is 
> repeated short blinks and no interuption of sound output.
> 
> I've checked that dma is operating (via 'hparm') and I can play DVDs
100%
> OK 
> via xine. I can also play CDs OK via xine although xine seems to spend
> some 
> time reading the CD before beginning to play. After that I get the
> expected 
> repeated short blinks from the Drive LED, but no interuptions in sound 
> output.
> 

DMA was my first thought, but thinking about it - the data throughput for
reading a CD should be a lot lower than for playing a DVD, so that
shouldn't be a problem.

> Can anyone tell me how to get CD PLayer and Sound Juicer to work
properly?
> 

The only other thing I can think of is how the audio is being routed. If
Debian is using one of the fancy audio layers, but the CD player has been
configured to use bypass that and use the alsa driver direct, or something
like that, it could be getting some contention for the audio device?

It's really embarrassing how screwed up multimedia, in particular audio,
still is on Linux. It's far better than it historically has been and most
mainstream distributions they seem to be getting the configuration in a
reasonable state, but it's definitely not intuitive yet. There's just too
many alternatives, with each application supporting output via a subset of
the available options, leading to the distribution maintainers having to
support too many different routes.

Martyn