Sound in Amarok stutters randomly, no luck

English Hardware
1

hello, i have a Compaq C700 laptop with an intel hd soundcard and all sound works fine except in amarok. It seems to be random, but the sound will slightly stutter - alot sometimes, and maybe once every 5 songs othertimes, but its very annoying.

I am using opensuse 11 kde 3, with amarok w/ xine output+alsa. the default “yauap” output skips just the same, but the default “analyzer” at the bottom is noticeably about 1 second off, so i switched to the xine but no luck. Also the sound buffer in the KDE control settings set to maximum doesnt help.

The sound plays perfectly on Amarok Ubuntu/Kubuntu on the same laptop. any ideas? this is really annoying.

Now playing: Lupe Fiasco - I Gotcha
via FoxyTunes

2

I think i may have solved this one myself…i went back to the control center and noticed that “run with highest priority” was unchecked and gave me some error message about “artswrapper not installed” so i installed some arts packages: kdemultimedia3-arts, kdemultimedia3-arts-mad, klibs3-arts, and libxine1-arts then the priority setting worked and amarok hasnt skipped in about 2 hours. this may not work with the yauap engine, maybe someone could confirm, as i am using the xine w/alsa output. make sure to restart amarok first.

hope this helps someone.

3

Nevermind, the problem continues. It is very random, it mostly happens when i’m not doing anything, but even when i have avi files encoding to dvd (with devede) and 10 windows open and the compiz cube spinning it happens just as randomly. Sound in Mplayer and VLC works fine, i watch videos quite a bit with no stuttering.

Again Ubuntu/Kubuntu work perfectly and i wish not to go back to them as i have always preferred Opensuse.

If anyone can help please share.

Thanks

4

Did you try running “top” when this is happening, to see if there is another process running that is causing this problem?

Perhaps beagle indexing your hard drive, or something like that?

5

One of the first things i do after a fresh install is kill the beagle icon and select “do not start automatically”, so i dont think beagle runs, at least it doesnt show up in top or k system guard. this stuttering will still happen if i boot up and only run amarok and nothing else, with or without compiz enabled.

i am having trouble pinpointing the source of the stuttering because it truly seems completely random. within the last 10 songs or so it has skipped twice, once while i was just sitting and listening, and just now as i am typing this.

i’d be glad to post some terminal outputs here but i have no idea what commands to issue.

thanks

6

Don’t use Amarok, use kaffeine instead. They have similar functionality.

7

thats a joke right? amarok is the holy grail of linux applications. kaffeine is ok for videos but with mplayer and vlc there is no reason to use kaffeine.

8

I disagree.

I use multimedia a lot, and never run Amarok. Rarely I run Mplayer. Kaffeine satisfies all my needs.

First get the answer on sound quality using kaffeine. If the problem persists, it may be a bug in driver, its interface, or kernel.

9

The first thing I do, as part of the software setup, even before the install of software starts, is select beagle NOT to be installed.

If you are unsure if beagle might be running in the back ground, and if you do not use beagle, then why not remove it?

Be certain to make a note of anything else that may be running.