FLAC playback cuts short

[Samuel Coleman]

When playing certain files, playback abruptly and prematurely ceases at a position apparently specific to the file. This appears to be an issue with playback of only a small portion of the song; if I use a player capable of seeking and seek to past the point of failure, playback continues normally. I initially noticed this problem with Quot Libet, but can consistently reproduce it in Totem so I'm led to believe it's GStreamer that has the problem, and not the consuming application.

Neither of the aforementioned applications present any errors (to stderr, internal error log, or as a popup message) when encountering the issue, and simply continue to the next song in the playlist. Additionally, `flac -t "$file"` does not report any issues with affected files, and both `flac -dc "$file" | aplay` and `ffplay "$file"` correctly play affected files, proving that the issue exists with GStreamer, and not the file itself (or at least, proving that GStreamer behaves in a far less fault-tolerant manner than other options).

An example file, available at https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BwkONbGn86mBXzRTRDZtZkI0Y0E/edit?usp=sharing, dies about 0:03 in, so you don't have to wait very long to experience it.

This bug is a cross-post from the upstream bug #695044, visible at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=695044. The official 0.10 maintainer has confirmed the issue, but wants nothing to do with it, which is unfortunate, given that it affects all applications using 0.10, and given the ABI/API differences between 0.10 and 1.0, its solution is not a simple “recompile the application to use 1.0”.