[Flac-dev] Re: xmms-flac problem

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Tue, Jan 22, 2002 at 10:58:02PM -0500, Asheesh Laroia wrote:

> The best I can suggest is, run XMMS on repeat mode for a few hours.  The
> flac plugin will, if my setup isn't bizarre (it's just debian testing),
> eventually give way.  Just disable audio output or something, let it run
> overnight, and see what state it's in in the morning.  I'm sure the Oggs
> will be a suitable test, rather than MP3s.

I've been repeating a playlist with a single FLAC file in it for almost an
hour now.  It's outputting to the disk writer plugin, and it takes about 8
seconds to process the 7 minute song, so it has played it about 450 times
and is still going.  I think that establishes that your problem doesn't
occur in this setup.  I'm running unstable.

Please send me the output of "dpkg -l" (don't send a copy to the
@bugs.debian.org address) on the affected system.

> Just try a playlist of two entries, with shuffle and repeat enabled: one
> flac, one ogg.  Even if they're two seconds long.  And leave it running
> overnight.

I found an MP3, so I'm now looping a playlist with one FLAC, one MP3 and one
Ogg Vorbis file, about 7 minutes, 7 minutes and 4 minutes.  I'll leave this
running overnight and see what happens.

> I've actually seen it happen once before, I think when I upgraded xmms
> before without upgrading flac.  I've definitely seen it before, but I'm
> not sure when.
> 
> If there's something I can do, like a backtrace, that'd be great.  But
> XMMS doesn't crash, the flac plugin's functionality just breaks.

The best thing that you can do is find out how to reliably reproduce the
problem.  Try to find a way to make it happen every time, predictably, and
with as few steps as possible.

I suggest you try your test with the disk writer plugin (use a small
playlist, or it will require a lot of disk space) and see if it still
happens.  That will eliminate some variables.

> In the winamp plugin, actually, I've seen an error (something about a
> stream, I seem to recall) that breaks FLAC functionality there as well.
> Should I get this error message?  It has an error number, I recall.

Definitely, yes.  If you see this problem with both Winamp and XMMS, it
isn't an XMMS problem at all, but a FLAC problem.

I had an idea...this has happened with at least one other third-party
program which links with libxmms (libxmms-perl).  These two programs are
linked differently than the plugins included with xmms.  For example,
libmpg123.so is linked with essentially only the GTK libraries, while
libxmms-flac.so and libxmms-perl are linked with libxmms.  libwav.so is only
linked with the C library.  If we assume that these two problems are
related, this could provide a clue.

-- 
 - mdz