Re: Esound poor quality playback of certain wavfiles

[Michael Epting <mikeepting usa net>]

Can anybody else comment on this?

Andrew, did you by any chance get an off-list reply to this query?
I was quiet because "me, too!" is of no help, but if you have a 
solution, can you share it?  By the way, I believe that it has not
always been this way.  I used to be very pleased with the way xmms
sounded.  Some recent upgrade has broken esd, perhaps?  I have rpm 
esound-0.2.15-1 from golem.labs.redhat.com and pretty much the 
latest rpms I can find for most else, but gnome-libs 1.0.55 from 
tarball.

Andrew Post wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Certain wavfiles are played with very poor quality when played through
> esound. I've experienced this with esdplay, xmms (with the esd plugin),
> and timidity++ (which converts the midi files to wav). What I mean is,
> there is a lot of distortion in the high frequency ranges. I've attached
> a sample wav to show you what I mean. Try playing it through esdplay,
> then try playing it with something that doesn't use esdplay (like the
> play command that comes with Redhat)...what a difference! When I first
> installed Mandrake, I was surprised at how crummy the wav files were
> that came with the OS, but now I realize it's just esound that's
> screwing them up somehow.
> 
> If it helps any, the 16-bit wav files that are shipped with KDE 1.1.2
> don't exhibit this behavior. Just 8-bit wav files.
> 
> System:
> Linux Mandrake 6.1
> October GNOME (latest esound and audiofile releases)
> Ensoniq AudioPCI soundcard (ES1370) with commercial OSS 3.9.3c.
> 
> Thanks in advance for any help you can contribute!
> 
> Andrew