Re: esd == bad_sound

[Ronald de Man <deman win tue nl>]

On Thu, Mar 04, 1999 at 04:33:23AM +0000, Elliot Lee wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Mar 1999 22:58:52 -0500 (EST), James Charles Lewis
> <lewis1@expert.cc.purdue.edu> wrote:
> 
> >Maybe its just me, but doesn't esd's sound basically suck?
> >
> >I'm using mpg123 through esd, and there are always clicks and blips.  Even
> >when mpg3's aren't playing, I can hear stuff clicking after sound effects.
> 
> esd is not 100% noise-free, but it doesn't seem any worse than /dev/dsp
> directly.

For me, anything played through esd sounds clearly worse than through
/dev/dsp directly. It could be my sucky sound card though (it's a
Creative ViBRA16X PnP, which doesn't have a 16 bit DMA channel, and
I am one of the few that experience slowdowns whenever esd has
/dev/dsp open, even when nothing is being played (and the X in ViBRA16X
matters here)).
> 
> esd does have some problems with changing sample rates - afaik it doesn't
> do interpolation when resampling, which might explain it if you are
> playing back sounds at a different sample rate than esd is talking to your
> hardware.

Even when the sample rates are equal the difference is clear.

> 
> Might want to get a bit more details on exactly which situations the
> problem occurs in and how it manifests itself - a question I ask sometimes
> is "what's the simplest possible way to reproduce this problem?"

The test.wav in the esound directory is 8 bits at 11025Hz.

First:

wavplay test.wav     (esdplay test.wav sounds the same as
		      long as esd is not running.)

'hasta la vista baby', sounds ok.

Now 'esd -r 11025 &' to start the esound daemon, and

esdplay test.wav

plays the sound but with a lot more noise, especially 'baby'
sounds awful. Some tiny subsegments are clearly repeated.
(And just in case.. esd -b -r 11025 makes no difference
here.)

With 16 bit sound esd performs better, but still with a few ticks
at the start of a sample.

Again, some of this could just be a problem with my sound card. But
I've never had problems with programs other than esd, and also the
slowdowns are not there when wavplay is running.

Ronald