esd plays back too slow on envy24-based soundcards.

[Luke Yelavich]

When attempting to use esound under GNOME with either an M-Audio Delta 66, or
TerraTec DMX 6Fire 24/96 sound cards, both of which use the envy24 chipset, from
beginning to the end of a GNOME session, all sounds are played at half speed.
Sometimes, it changes to being played back faster than the original.

Take the startup sound for example. It has a sample rate of 44100hz. Upon login
to GNOME, I figured that it is being played back at 22050Hz. I don't know what
speed files get played back when they are played faster.

On-Board AC97 audio works normally.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=319583: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=319583

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

What output do you see when you run esd by hand?

Does it work correctly if you play directly to the ALSA device?

[Luke Yelavich (themuso)]

Here is what I get when running esd by hand.

Audio device open for 44.1Khz, stereo, 16bit failed
Trying 44.1Khz, 8bit stereo.
Audio device open for 44.1Khz, stereo, 8bit failed
Trying 48Khz, 16bit stereo.
Audio device open for 48Khz, stereo,16bit failed
Trying 22.05Khz, 8bit stereo.
Audio device open for 22.05Khz, stereo, 8bit failed
Trying 44.1Khz, 16bit mono.
Audio device open for 44.1Khz, mono, 8bit failed
Trying 22.05Khz, 8bit mono.
Audio device open for 22.05Khz, mono, 8bit failed
Trying 11.025Khz, 8bit stereo.
Audio device open for 11.025Khz, stereo, 8bit failed
Trying 11.025Khz, 8bit mono.
Audio device open for 11.025Khz, mono, 8bit failed
Trying 8.192Khz, 8bit mono.

Yet these envy24 cards are capable of 96Khz.

The aplay command plays a sound file normally through ALSA.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Let's see ... which rate does native ALSA use? Please do

  aplay -v /usr/share/sounds/startup.wav

and copy the output here.

Also, what does

  esdctl serverinfo

say? (this command is in the esound-clients package).

[Luke Yelavich (themuso)]

aplay -v /usr/share/sounds/startup.wav
Playing WAVE '/usr/share/sounds/startup.wav' : Signed 16 bit Little Endian, Rate
44100 Hz, Stereo
Plug PCM: Route conversion PCM (sformat=S32_LE)
Transformation table:
0 <- 0
1 <- 1
2 <- none
3 <- none
4 <- none
5 <- none
6 <- none
7 <- none
8 <- none
9 <- none
Its setup is:
stream : PLAYBACK
access : RW_INTERLEAVED
format : S16_LE
subformat : STD
channels : 2
rate : 44100
exact rate : 44100 (44100/1)
msbits : 16
buffer_size : 6553
period_size : 1638
period_time : 37142
tick_time : 1000
tstamp_mode : NONE
period_step : 1
sleep_min : 0
avail_min : 1638
xfer_align : 1638
start_threshold : 6552
stop_threshold : 6553
silence_threshold: 0
silence_size : 0
boundary : 1717829632
Slave: Hardware PCM card 0 'M Audio Delta 66' device 0 subdevice 0

Its setup is:
stream : PLAYBACK
access : MMAP_INTERLEAVED
format : S32_LE
subformat : STD
channels : 10
rate : 44100
exact rate : 44100 (44100/1)
msbits : 24
buffer_size : 6553
period_size : 1638
period_time : 37142
tick_time : 1000
tstamp_mode : NONE
period_step : 1
sleep_min : 0
avail_min : 1638
xfer_align : 1638
start_threshold : 6552
stop_threshold : 6553
silence_threshold: 0
silence_size : 0
boundary : 1717829632

esdctl serverinfo
server version = 0
server format = 0x00000000
server rate = 8192

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

In dapper we want to get rid of esound. For now you should just switch the
gstreamer backend to ALSA to make it work for you (System -> Preferences ->
Multimedia system, or call gstreamer-properties directly).

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

forwarded upstream.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

The new sound backend is now implemented in Breezy, i. e. for the majority of
people esound should not be used at all. This should mitigate these problems
considerably.

[Simon Kågedal (simon-helgo)]

Could you possibly point me to instructions on how to move to this new sound backend?

I have an updated system, and I have ALSA as both Default Sink and Default Source, but esound still starts at login and I get the incredibly slow startup sound.

Thank yuo!

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Right, sound events still use esd, that is hardwired into libgnome. However, all Gnome applications use gstreamer, which now should automatically use the autosink (gstreamer 0.10 has its own set of gconf settings, so you should already have it). Do applications like rhythmbox work correctly now?

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

To check this properly, what is the output of

  gst-launch-0.10 --gst-debug=autodetect:5 filesrc location=/usr/share/sounds/generic.wav ! wavparse ! autoaudiosink

(You need the gstreamer0.10-tools package for that)

[Simon Kågedal (simon-helgo)]

Hi! Sorry for not answering to this, my mailer thought it was spam for some reason...

I'm a bit confused -- AFAICT, there is no gstreamer 0.10 in Breezy, only 0.8. No 0.10 turns up when I search for "gstreamer" in synaptic or on packages.ubuntu.com.

Gstreamer apps like Rhythmbox sort of works, but only one at I time. I say "sort of" -- I just tried Rhythmbox for the first time in a long while, and when I played mp3s, there was glitches in the sound, like little cuts and clicks. I guess that's another bug report, though...

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Indeed I refered to Dapper, not Breezy. Can you try this with the current Dapper beta-2 live CD?

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Unassigning. This was forwarded upstream, and we don't use esound by default any more.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Awaiting confirmation that this symptom is reproducible on current 8.04 or 8.10 alpha.

[Javier Jardón (jjardon)]

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.searchtext=&orderby=datecreated&search=Search&field.status%3Alist=INCOMPLETE_WITHOUT_RESPONSE&assignee_option=any&field.assignee=&field.bug_reporter=&field.bug_supervisor=&field.bug_commenter=&field.subscriber=&field.component-empty-marker=1&field.status_upstream-empty-marker=1&field.omit_dupes.used=&field.omit_dupes=on&field.has_patch.used=&field.has_cve.used=&field.tag=&field.tags_combinator=ANY&field.has_no_package.used=