Re: Good music player suggestion

[Martin Steigerwald <Martin@lichtvoll.de>]

Am Samstag, 26. Mai 2012 schrieb Modestas Vainius:
> Hello,

Hi Modestas,

> On ketvirtadienis 24 Gegužė 2012 22:17:26 Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> > And guess what with VLC I had a latency for audio playback. After
> > pressing play the video started immediately but sound was 1-2
> > seconds late.
> > 
> > This is just gone now with VLC directly using ALSA.
> 
> Hehe, the last nail in the PulseAudio coffin :)

Actually I am not so satisfied with this.

Now I had to fiddle around now to get Phonon and non Phonon apps to play 
audio simultaneously. But I think this time I found a quite good solution:

/etc/asound.conf:

pcm.phonon {
        type plug
        slave.pcm "dmix"
        hint {
                show on
                description "HDA Intel PCH mit Mixer"
        }
}

And I set this as audio output in Phonon.

Now I can have alsaplayer and Amarok playing simultaneously as dmix is 
already configured in current libasound2. So no further complex dmix 
configuration snippets required as thats already done.

But then when I switch to a second KDE session sound playback again is 
muted. This even holds after a reboot! Even when alsamixer has all volumes 
up and no channel muted.

I can fix it by:

merkaba:~> alsactl init
Found hardware: "HDA-Intel" "Intel CougarPoint HDMI" 
"HDA:14f1506e,17aa21cf,00100000 HDA:14f12c06,17aa2122,00100000 
HDA:80862805,80860101,00100000" "0x17aa" "0x21cf"
Hardware is initialized using a generic method


But then I still do not get sound on second KDE session (work) 
simultaneously to the first (private) although I set the same dmix output.

Seems Phonon opens it exclusively. And when I define a second one in 
asound.conf Phonon exclusively just uses one, the second of it.

And in VLC and other applications I need to switch to the USB sound card 
manually.

I´d like something simple that does:

1) Switch to USB sound card if I plug it in.

2) Sets volume to last save state for all channels.

3) Just playbacks music and sound.

4) In any application including flash videos.

5) Has no noticable latency. (Heck latency on a ThinkPad T520 with Intel 
i5 Dualcore? What gives?)

6) Does not require any manual configuration except for defining priority 
for sound cards and setting volume levels.

7) Works with mutiple applications and mutiple sessions.

Is there such a something?

I´d even work through some initial configuration if it then just works.

Thus Pulseaudio would be fine, if it actually did work to my satisfaction.

Ok, I stop now. My rant is misplaced here. A report that two copies of 
Phonon does not seem to be able to share a dmix enabled output might be 
good for upstream at bugs.kde.org.

So or so the current situation seems better than before. Cause at least 
for the internal sound card with one session it works! And I use the USB 
sound card for one application at a time anyway. And the internal one now 
does Youtube flash video sound while a Phonon appplication like Amarok is 
running - hope they switch to HTML 5 soon even without not enabling the 
HTML 5 test mode before. 

So thats fine for now.

And I even get louder playback than ever before with the internal speakers 
on the T520.

I now use Phonon VLC, cause with Phonon Gstreamer Amarok doesn´t play all 
sound files. And then for Phonon Gstreamer there is the idea to switch it 
to Pulseaudio only¹.

[1] http://wm161.net/2012/05/16/musings-on-the-linux-audio-stack

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