Just out of interest, what results have people had with the crossfading
back end?
I tried it on ubuntu 6.10 up to my current 7.10, and I've always had
problems with it.
I find that the playback buffers a lot, maybe a half a second playback,
followed by half a second silence indefinately, and my system slows down
when using, this is especially when playing m4a files.
I haven't had that problem, but I've had problems with playback for all intents and purposes "stopping" at the end of a track. Jonathan has mentioned in the past that it has to do with ALSA's dmix or something, but I haven't been able to get any further than that in terms of tracking it down.
Generally though, the developers seem to recognize that it has its minor/sporadic/etc. bugs.