Rhythmbox jams after other apps use ALSA

[teledyn]

Binary package hint: rhythmbox

This is a NEW situation, it has only occurred since some updates from within perhaps the last month:

1) load Rhythmbox, play a track: the track plays fine, but no other alsa or aoss-wrapped sounds will play; the other apps go through the motions of playback, but no sound is heard. For example, a youtube will play the video, but there is no sound.
2) stop Rhytmbox play, other apps can now play sounds, eg Firefox Flash-9 like Youtube and aoss apps
3) press play on Rhythmbox, the play icon highlights, but the timetrack does not advance and there is no sound.
4) unselect play, it will un-highlight, but clicking on it will not highlight the play again
5) all selection controls and menu controls will work, but if you choose 'quit' Gnome will say the app is not responding and ask if you want to kill it.
6) stop the other sound apps and Rhythmbox remains paralized, the play icon will not respond to a click
7) if another app is already playing, eg Firefox playing a YouTube, if I start Rhythmbox it will fail immediately, lock up and not play the selected track, the icon highlights and dehighlights, and then responds no more.
8) while a Firefox YouTube is playing, other apps will play, only rhythmbox appears to be locked out.
9) even if the Firefox YouTube is stopped, Rhythmbox still will not play. I can close the YouTube tab, but it still does not allow Rhythmbox to play; mpg321 will play no problem, just RB is locked out, even if run within aoss

this is a SERIOUS loss of functionality;RB cannot be used for background listening while working because it interferes with all other sound apps, and again, this is a new situation. Previously I could keep rhythmbox running all day with its own mix on low and let other apps run freely, there was no conflict.

Previously this lockup of the playback would happen sporadically but only on startup; I thought it might be due to clicking the 'play' before Rhythmbox had completely scanned all the drives for fresh content, but I could never really prove that. Sometimes it would jam, most often it did not, and when it jammed the quit (using the X icon in the gnome frame) would say the app was not responding and ask permission to kill it.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Fri Jun 13 09:15:27 2008
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.04
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/rhythmbox
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx
Package: rhythmbox 0.11.5-0ubuntu7
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
 LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: rhythmbox
Uname: Linux 2.6.24-18-rt i686

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for your bug report. could you try to write short and clear description? we get hundred of bugs every day and a one page description doesn't make the job easier for anybody
what audio and video preference is configured in system, preferences, sounds, audio and video? does using alsa there fixes your issue?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

also do you have issue when not using flash videos? the acrobad closed source plugin is known to create such issues

[teledyn (garym-teledyn)]

Geez get a grip man. I'm not surprised you get hundreds of bugs every day.

I have solved my problem ... by switching to Audacious.

"audio and video preference"?? wtf is that? Pardon my alarm, but do you have any notion of just how many preference dialogs are contained in the average Linux system? What do you want, chipsets and kernel drivers? and what does my video preference have to do with this? Rhythmbox only works at certain color depths or screen dot pitches?

I was also under the impression that the "report bugs" menu item in the Rhythmbox Help menu would include attachments that would report my RELEVANT system configuration details and the state of the program at the time, but clearly that's the two hundred and first bug of the day.

FWIW, I checked, and the 'preferences' dialog on your software does not include ANY audio OR video preferences.

"what audio and video preference is configured in system, preferences, sounds, audio and video? does using alsa there fixes your issue?" neither of these questions parse. My initial report clearly says I am using alsa and use aoss and all the other alsa apps, including Audacious, work fine together, only Rhythmbox fails, and this is a new situation, it worked fine until recent Ubuntu updates on 8.04. Sorry if that is not short and clear enough for you.

Stupid me, I thought I'd be doing you a favour by reporting the new holes in your software, especially a show-stopper like "does not play well with others", especially something so specific as a short timeline that would need to be within a small set of update patches, but clearly I'm wrong, so I'll stop wasting your precious time and let you get on with those 199 other new bug reports.

Audacity is a nicer program anyway.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

you don't have a really constructive attitude there

"system, preferences, sounds, audio and video" describes how to access the property dialog you don't seem able to find on your installation

you should have 3 menus available, system is one of those, it has a preferences category which has a "sounds" entry, click on this one, in the dialog one option is "audio and video"

[teledyn (garym-teledyn)]

In Ubuntu 8.04, I have System/Preferences/Sound -- notice the slashmarks, the way everyone in the known universe signifies menu paths -- and there is no 'sounds', and under 'sound' there is no "audio and video" only Devices, of which the Sound Events says autodetect; I don't think this is at all the right place, it appears to deal with sound icons in the desktop.

as stated before, I am using alsa and all other apps, including but not restricted to Flash 9, work fine. but the use of any other alsa app is blocked by Rhythmbox, and if they are in use when Rhythmbox is invoked, the program hangs on the playback switch, needing a kill signal to stop it. Audacious, on the other hand. works flawlessly, even with Flash-9 videos running; this was the same with Rhythmbox until only very very recently, which is why I suspected that some recent update, whether of rhythmbox or of Ubuntu in general, has broken it. It is suspicious that only Rhythmbox is affected, but to be fair, I have not exhaustively tried every possible combination on ever sound app available with Ubuntu, I have only tried mplayer, firefox/flash-9, audacious, mpg321, timidity and fluidsynth, and all of these work fine with each other, but none of these will share the audio system with Rhythmbox.

[Ben Somers (somanyrobots)]

Just to make a note, I am experiencing the same bug (also running Ubuntu Hardy). Symptoms identical to those reported by teledyn. RB will not start playing a song if any other app has engaged ALSA first (another player, firefox when viewing pages with sound, anything). If I start any other alsa-using software first (tested w/ mplayer, audacious, and firefox 3 beta), then RB will not play, keeping the tracker at 00:00. Other apps don't conflict with each other, but they all conflict with RB.

However, if I start RB as soon as I boot up, then it will monopolize alsa and no other app is able to play any sounds. If I then close RB and start another app (audacious), that app can play. If I then close the other app and restart RB, RB will not play. I also suspect it's a recent ubuntu update, as rhythmbox worked just fine until June 12 or 13.

[Christophe Dumez (hydr0g3n)]

I would like to confirm this bug too. I first experienced it when I upgraded to Hardy (I updated to Intrepid and it is still buggy).

I think it is related to the flash plugin. I noticed that I have playback problems in rhythmbox only when Firefox is running (not all the time, probably when there is or there was flash running). The symptoms are the sames as the bug reporter's.

I double-click on a track to play it, no sound and the progress bar does not move. I have to close/kill rhythmbox, close firefox, open rhythmbox again and now playback is working. This happens really often.

I would be happy to provide more specific information (or make some tests on your behalf) if someone is willing to fix this annoying bug.

[Christophe Dumez (hydr0g3n)]

This is very easy to reproduce here :
1. Launch firefox
2. Play a song in rhythmbox
3. Pause the song in rhythmbox
4. Go to youtube and play a video
5. Pause the video on youtube
6. Resume the song playback in rhythmbox <- this fails and you need to kill rhythmbox.

This bug was introduced when switching to pulseaudio, could this be related?

[Christophe Dumez (hydr0g3n)]

I'm attaching rhythmbox debug output.

Firefox is running and I played a youtube video. Then I ran rhythmbox in debug mode and tried to play a song. It failed and I had to kill it. I hope this output can be of some help.

[Christophe Dumez (hydr0g3n)]

Wow, I have just installed libflashsupport package and it looks like it is working fine now.

So it is related to flash and pulseaudio after all.

I got the idea from the ubuntu french forum where users are getting the same bug: http://forum.ubuntu-fr.org/viewtopic.php?id=220138

[Christophe Dumez (hydr0g3n)]

Person reporting the same problem here (in english this time :) :
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=94109

[Hyuga (hyugaricdeau)]

I would like to confirm that I was having this problem, and installing libflashsupport seems to have fixed it.

(the first time it happened to me, I tried playing a file in RB while a flash 9 video was playing, and it completely brought down the OS--couldn't even SSH in).

[teledyn (garym-teledyn)]

I installed libflashsupport, but while Rhythmbox is playing aoss-wrapped sound apps still do not play; they go through the motions, but still no sound comes out. Audacious will not play (failed audio output), but mpg321 WILL play, although it first complains that

ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:874:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave
ALSA snd_pcm_open error: Device or resource busy

I tried adding this to my .asoundrc to see if perhaps the aoss routing might be off
 pcm.dsp0 { type plug slave.pcm "dmix" }

also tried hw0,0 but it still does not work with rhythmbox, and after closing rhythmbox, aoss still will not run although mpg321 will.

could this be a gstreamer bug?

[Davide Saurino (dsaurino)]

I can confirm the same bug on my Ubuntu 8.04, solved by installing the libflashsupport package as suggested.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

seems to be an another flash or pulseaudio issue and not a rhythmbox bug

[Luke Yelavich (themuso)]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Are you by chance running packages from the hardy-proposed repository? To check, have a look in /etc/apt/sources.list, and check whether the lines mentioning hardy-proposed do not have a # in front of them.

Could you also paste into the bug the output of 'apt-cache policy libasound2'? Thanks.

 status incomplete
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFIew1kjVefwtBjIM4RAi4wAKCjf7q1chJnbdR/Yta5u2SZ7FWD/wCgxYyj
sJCuAD18bAetwpj8FZh1hUY=
=Qyyt
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

[teledyn (garym-teledyn)]

The string 'proposed' does not occur in my sources.list.
here are the non-src lines that I have in there (minus the noise ;)

hardy main restricted
hardy-updates main restricted
hardy universe
hardy multiverse
hardy-backports main restricted universe multiverse
hardy-security main restricted
hardy-security universe
hardy-security multiverse

$ apt-cache policy libasound2
libasound2:
  Installed: 1.0.15-3ubuntu4
  Candidate: 1.0.15-3ubuntu4
  Version table:
 *** 1.0.15-3ubuntu4 0
        500 http://ubuntu.mirrors.skynet.be hardy/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[teledyn (garym-teledyn)]

also just confirmed that with the Flash-nonfree 10.0, I can now watch a video on YouTube while listening to audacious and playing viavoice through aoss emulation, but when Rhythmbox is started it starts cataloging files and seems fine except that the track progress meter does not move and there is no sound; if I click on the play (to unselect it) it's fine, but when I click play again, it hangs and if I then click the window decoration X to close it, gnome says the app is not responding and offers to kill it. I get the same behaviour WITHOUT FIREFOX, simply having some other alsa app running and playing sound (eg audacious) when Rhythmbox is started. There are no status messages to stderr/stdout.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

that's not a rhythmbox bug

[teledyn (garym-teledyn)]

Sebastien Bacher wrote "that's not a rhythmbox bug"

so unfortunate that whoever's bug it is, it seems it ONLY affects rhythmbox. Audacious works fine with ALSA, as does mpg321, mplayer, xine, totem and mpd; sorry, I have no other sound-players to test.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

did you try totem-xine or totem-gstreamer? what about gst-launch? the other players you list are not using gstreamer

[eidam655 (eidam655)]

i also experience this bug on ubuntu hardy heron. iinstalling libflashsupport package does not resolve the problem; i'd call it an other bug. please help as soon as possible; many users will appreciate this. thank you.

changing audiosinks through gstreamer-properties has no effect whatsoever.

this is the 'apt-cache policy libasound2' output.

libasound2:
  Installed: 1.0.16-0ubuntu0.1
  Candidate: 1.0.16-0ubuntu0.1
  Version table:
 *** 1.0.16-0ubuntu0.1 0
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     1.0.15-3ubuntu4 0
        500 http://sk.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/main Packages

[crazybyte (vlzoltan)]

I also confirm this bug. In my case the issue is between Amarok and Firefox/Flash 9 plugin. Depending on what was started first the other didn't work. I tried the suggestion of installing libflashsupport and the issue is solved. It seems a Flash plugin and Pulse Audio interaction bug.

[crazybyte (vlzoltan)]

Sorry I forgot to mention on my previous comment the following: the distribution is a fresh Ubuntu Hardy Heron install.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

This bug is fixed in intrepid (and jaunty). For hardy, you may try installing libflashsupport, but it may be unstable for you (may crash your browser). The best option is to use backports of libasound2, libasound2-plugins, and adobe-flashplugin. In the latter case, you will need to remove flashplugin-nonfree and libflashsupport.