I want my reliable laptop based Amarok jukebox back

Thu Aug 8 13:08:17 UTC 2013

Using phonon-backends mailing list as I didn´t found any user related phonon 
mailing list, if people who can help with phonon are subscribed to Amarok 
mailing list, feel free to drop phonon-backends mailing list from Cc.

Hi!

Once upon a time I had a ThinkPad T23 with KDE 3 and Amarok 1.4, first without, 
then with Sonica Theater USB 1.1 sound card. And it just played music. 
Reliable, even after some kernel scheduler improvements I tested for Ingo 
Molnar without any glitches even when I moved around windows or did whatever 
on that box. It just played and the world was good. There have been issues 
once in a while, but generally it just worked. Also sound worked just nicely 
after hibernation. For the USB sound card for a time I had to unload usb sound 
module from kernel before hibernation and load it again (with TuxOnIce and 
hibernate script back then).

Then I switched to KDE 4.2 and Amarok 2 and Phonon. And since then I cannot 
remember to have had this "it just works" reliability that I had with KDE 3 
and Amarok 1.4 without Phonon.

I know a rant could start this way – and well to some extent I admit this is a 
rant –, but I will try not to accuse anyone, I am just at the point where I 
realize: I can give Linux Performance training, I can build a kernel from git, 
test changes, build Debian packages and whatnot. But I can´t seem to make my 
Amarok jukebox setup reliable. I do not know in which layer to look. I do not 
know much about meaningful debugging. All I can do right now is to try this 
and that and this without any actual clue and hope it helps. So I reach out 
for help.

I do this on list, until I have any means to provide meaningful bug reports. I 
think I deal with several bugs. I am willing to work from this, there may be 
days of inactivity in between, due to real life stuff taking precendence, but I 
am willing to invest some time and energy once again, *if* there is a 
reasonable chance to get back reliably working system.

I am even willing to replace hardware. If a ThinkPad or netbookt with Intel HD 
audio provides a similar sound quality to that USB sound card, I´d buy one and 
ditch the USB sound card. If a USB 2 based sound card is likely to work 
better, I´d buy one. I do not insist on the exact hardware, a ThinkPad T6x 
with Intel HD Audio costs less than 200 Euro used, so what gives.

But I do like to get to a reliably working setup within a *reasonable* amount 
of time. Heck, it just needs to play music. My CD player does it, my Rockbox 
based Sansa e260v1 does it. It can´t be that difficult. And I like to keep 
Amarok. I am used to it, its a decent player software, it gets song texts, 
wikipedia and well has a nice GUI. I like to continue using it.

My basic requirements are:

- If I press play it plays sound. No discussions, no errors. Just play sound. 
As my CD player does. I play music mostly for recreational purposes so I am 
not willing to fiddle with things on a regular basis just to have it play my 
music. I am not willing to *fight* with my Amarok music jukebox to make it 
behave.

- If playing sound, play sound *fluently*. No dropouts, no hangs, no 
interference noise. Just play.

- On hibernating stop sound, on resuming continue playing where you stopped. 
Or well if not continuing right away, let me continue with pressing play 
again. For the time being, I´d even press stop before hibernation and play 
after it.

- I want to have Amarok running for days and weeks with hibernation cycles in 
between. I don´t want it to crash after resuming or something like that.

Current setup is: ThinkPad T42 with Pentium M 1.8 GHz which should be plenty 
to play MP3, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC in decent quality. I do have the Sonica 
Theater USB sound card, cause at least with the ThinkPad T23 where I was able 
to hear harddisk sounds in the internal audio output the sound quality was 
just so much better with that USB sound card. Its a USB 1.1 standard 7.1 sound 
capable soundcard, but I just use stereo, no 7.1 sound which might overload 
USB 1.1 bus. I use a old, good quality Kenwood receiver.

Software wise I use Debian Sid with KDE SC 4.10.5 and Amarok 2.7.1-1 and 
phonon 4.6.0.0-3 with phonon-backend-vlc 0.6.2-2 with ALSA. I didn´t use 
gstreamer as it skipped tracks and whatnot. I do not remember exactly what all 
happened with it, but it didn´t work for me. Kernel is 3.10-1-686-pae from 
official experimental debian package.

I do not use Pulseaudio 4 right now cause it still does not detect the USB 
sound card at all times, spamming logs with "usb_set_interface_failed" 
messages. I reported this once, Lennart even answered me back to my bug report 
and I admit I did not follow up then, cause what he asked me to do would have 
take some time to do and it was not the only bug with PulseAudio back then. I 
was just so annoyed by PulseAudio back then that I apt-get purge´d it. I would 
be willing to follow-up with this, as it seems that Pulseaudio 4 is the first 
Pulseaudio *ever* that is able to play *fluent* sound on the ThinkPad T42. With 
Pulseaudio 3 still I had sound drops longer than 20 seconds (this is *no* 
joke).

.kde/share/config/phonondevicesrc has:

[AudioDevice_/org/kde/solid/udev/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.1/usb3/3-2/3-2:1.0/sound/card1/
pcmC1D0c:capture]   
cardName=Sonica Theater (USB Audio)
deleted=false
deviceNumber=0
hotpluggable=true   
iconName=audio-card 
index=-8
initialPreference=36
isAdvanced=false

It has similar entries for this sound card at least a dozen of times, one of 
it must be the sound card at the top of the device list in phonon kcm.

A snippet of lsusb, I can attach or pastebin completely output somewhere.

Bus 003 Device 005: ID 0763:2007 Midiman M-Audio Sonica Theater
Device Descriptor:
  bLength                18
  bDescriptorType         1
  bcdUSB               1.10
  bDeviceClass            0 (Defined at Interface level)
  bDeviceSubClass         0 
  bDeviceProtocol         0 
  bMaxPacketSize0         8
  idVendor           0x0763 Midiman
  idProduct          0x2007 M-Audio Sonica Theater
  bcdDevice            1.01
  iManufacturer           1 
  iProduct                2 
  iSerial                 0 
  bNumConfigurations      1

Current symptoms:

- If I stop playback manually before hibernating and start it after 
hibernating Amarok seems to play sound but I cannot hear anything. If I then 
press stop Amarok crashes. In Systemsettings audio test I can play back sound. 
I will install debug packages and see whether I get get a meaningful 
backtrace.

- Although playback seems to be quite fluent recently, I still have casual 
dropouts for some reconds. On the ThinkPad T23 I had more dropouts than I now 
have on the ThinkPad T42, but heck the hardware is certainly able to play back 
some audio, isn´t it? My Amiga 4000 played MP3 it with a 50 MHz 68060, the 
Rockbox based Sansa can do it even with Ogg Vorbis, so…

- Sometimes a loud annoying noise is in the audio. I had this today while 
taking a bath. I jumped up to run into the living room to lower the volume as 
it was not something I´d like to expose to my neighbours for longer than 
necessary (USB sound driver issue?). If I unplug USB sound card and plug it 
back in again, it works again.

So how to proceed? I am especially interested in:

What is working for you?

I highly suspect that its working for a lot of people. So what is different 
with your setup?

Does anybody have a laptop with Amarok on top of his/her Hi-Fi equipment to 
play music, and hibernates and resumes it just fine and all is working? Then I 
would greatly appreciate a detailed description of the setup.

Any hints on where to start debugging?

Any hints on a best practice setup?

VLC or gstreamer?

Pulseaudio or not? I´d prefer to first get a stable setup *without* Pulseaudio 
to have one layer less to debug, but I am also willing to test out Pulseaudio 
again, especially as with 4.0 at least the unbearing latency, music dropouts 
issues have gone. (With VLC and Pulseaudio on this Sandybridge Dual core based 
ThinkPad T520 audio playback on playing a DVD start 5-10 seconds after the 
video playback has started. Without Pulseaudio it started *immediately*. On a 
*Sandybridge* based laptop. There is no hardware reason for that – the 
hardware is certainly capable, heck it can encode MP3 as fast as the audio CD 
grabber delivers it. This again is no joke.)

USB sound card or not?

What versions of everything?

Actually I think thats already too many questions. Why do I even have to 
decide on this? I wouldn´t like to explain something like this to my father or 
any other casual computer user.

IMHO this complexity is a huge mess, unless there is a default that will just 
work. Layers upon layers upon layers. Configuration choices over configuration 
choices.

I just want a jukebox and I want it to work. What are the magic ingredients? 
What is known to work?

Thanks,
-- 
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA  B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7