Distortion in Flac playback

[Myriam Schweingruber]

Hi Jack,

On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 1:21 AM, Jack F <jack at thesolderingbench.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I was hoping someone would be able to help me (or point me in the right
> direction of someone who I can ask) to find the cause of a distortion I seem to
> be hearing in some FLAC songs when they are played with Amarok. I have noticed
> it on two songs and have just tested the recordings in other players (VLC and
> Ocenaudio) and found that there is no distortion. However, there is distortion
> when playing through the preview player in the Information panel in Dolphin
> (... a KDE-wide problem...?).

No, simply a Phonon backend problem, as Both Amarok and Dolphin use
Phonon to play sound
>
> One song has distortion of the female singers vocals, and the other is on the
> bass. I have spliced part of one song that is have playback issues (on the
> bass) to see if anyone else has the problem (first at around 6s)
> (http://www.thesolderingbench.com/test.flac - 1.8MiB, 18s). I am running Amarok
> on Linux Mint 17 x86_64 using Phonon and the GStreamer backend. Fade is on and
> I have tried it both with and without replay gain. The distortion seems to
> happen at peaks in volumes.

As said above: Amarok doesn't play sound itself, but lets Phonon do
it. You could try using the vlc backend instead of the gstreamer one
to see if that helps. Else you should report this to the
kde-multimedia at kde.org mailing list, or better: file a bug for the
specific backend on http://bugs.kde.org

In any case: please make sure you have the latest Phonon and Phonon
backend versions available, as there have been a lot of updates
lately.

FWIW: I see the same distortions with the Phonon gstreamer backend v 4.7.80

Regards, Myriam
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