I want my reliable laptop based Amarok jukebox back

[Martin Steigerwald]

Am Samstag, 10. August 2013, 14:29:59 schrieb Myriam Schweingruber:
> Hi Martin,
> 
> On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 3:08 PM, Martin Steigerwald <Martin at lichtvoll.de> 
wrote:
> > 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.
> ...
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Well, your hardware is not exactly new, and the USB sound card is
> really old technology, I really can't judge as I have absolutely
> nothing equivalent to test with.
> 
> ...

Thank you for your answer.

Hmmm, okay. As noted, I´d be willing to change the hardware if it helps.
 
> > 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.
> 
> FWIW: I can't reproduce any of the problems you mention on my Lenovo
> X220 ThinkPad (on-board Intel sound card), running Amarok from git in
> a daily build, Kubuntu 13.04, KDE 4.10.98. Gstreamer backend 4.6.3,
> but it also works well with the vlc backend 0.6.2

Do you also hibernate and resume the machine?

How is the sound quality? I decided to use the USB sound card as after having 
tried it I got the impression I bought a completely new Kenwood receiver and 
set of loud speakers. The quality was hearably just so much better. The T23 
Intel sound output just was not able to bring out the qualities of my hi-fi 
equipment and as said, I even heard harddisk sounds in sound output at times.

> > 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).
> 
> Kubuntu uses Pulseaudio by default, and Phonon is compiled with PA
> support, which should be pretty standard currently. If you did remove
> Pulseaudio deliberately this might explain some of the sound problems
> you experience.

I always dropped Pulseaudio after having issues with it. Pulseaudio 4 still 
had the issue to work with that USB sound card, while at least the latency, 
dropout issues seem to have been solved.

In Debian Sid Pulseaudio also appears to be optional for KDE.

Pulseaudio might be an option if either I take the time to follow-up on the 
usb_set_interface failed thing, or I just ditch the USB sound card and try 
with Intel audio output of T42 or preferably a newer ThinkPad with Intel HD 
audio which might give better quality.
 
> We released Amarok 2.8 beta several weeks ago, and there have been
> many fixes in the engine controller stack since 2.7.0, how about
> giving it a try? With over 500 commits since 2.7.0 there has been a
> lot of work put into it, fixing a lot of bugs and glitches.

I am not sure whether I want to compile it just right now, but I certainly 
will install the packages once available in Debian Sid.

I still wonder how I can say in which layer a given problem is and how I can 
debug stuff effectively. Do you know any HOWTO for this?

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