I listen to all of my music via streaming it from my home machine, and transcoding it on the fly. I recently made 2 changes to my setup:
- I’m using audacious for playback instead of xmms
- I switched to a more recent version of lame.
After doing so, about 1 in 10 files would fail to play (either silence, or strange thumping noises) on audacious, saying one or more of the following messages:
(audacious:12805): MADPlug-WARNING **: samplerate varies!!
(audacious:12805): MADPlug-WARNING **: layer varies!!
(audacious:8645): MADPlug-WARNING **: number of channels varies!!
If I downloaded the file and played that, it worked just fine, so it was something weird about the fact that it was streaming. My lame transcoding commandline was:
lame –mp3input -h –vbr-new -V 6 -B 320 -b 32 -S -m j $file -
The problem seems to be –vbr-new, since if I remove that option, it works great all the time. Go figure.
In general, I think audacious sucks. Now I also think that madplug sucks. Oh, and by the way, all of this was precipitated by Fedora removing xmms from their repositories due to mp3 licensing issues. Fedora sucks too. Ugh! It seems as though mp3 playback under Linux has taken a huge step backwards…
Fedora has xmms in the repository btw. The mp3 codecs are available from http://rpmfusion.org and it all works just fine. If you have issues, feel free to post to rpmfusion-users list and we can sort it out.
Yeah, thanks for the reminder. I did recently set up rpufusion on my box, but still, the frustration of Fedora removing mp3 support completely from their distribution is extremely annoying. I consider it removed functionality, since what I thought I was doing was getting a patched version of xmms with bug fixes, but what I really got was a crippled version of xmms that made me unable to use my machine for music playback.
Ubuntu doesn’t seem to have similar issues, and I plan on switching to Ubuntu on my next machine upgrade.
Fedora has never included mp3 codecs. XMMS supports mp3 via plugins and that plugin is simply not included in Fedora due to patent issues. Ubuntu is not a US based distribution so the laws are different but it cannot include certain software legally either like libdvdcss for playing commercial dvd’s. If you want to understand why, read
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-audio-format-matters.html and
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems
Put it simply, there is no legal way to include free and open source codecs that play mp3 in a distribution that targets US (and other places where software patents are valid). Fedora Project and Red Hat continue to fight against software patents but this is a long term proposition with big proprietary vendors and patent holders on the other side. The real problem is software patents.
Ubuntu has good non-free codec support, but they (following Debian) have removed xmms because they don’t want to support gtk1. The last version of Ubuntu to provide xmms is Gutsy Gibbon, going EOL on 18-Apr-09. I’m still trying to figure out what to do going forward.