GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 581572
Music skips during playback
Last modified: 2009-05-10 10:06:09 UTC
Please describe the problem: Music is skipping during playback, kind of like a CD skipping. Each skip lasts a fraction of a second and usually occurs every 5 - 10 seconds. CPU load on the system is nill (Intel Core 2, 3 GHZ, 4GB RAM). I believe this issue is related to rTorret running in background (only uploading 20-100KB/s, no downloading) Steps to reproduce: 1. Run rTorrent in backround 2. Play music 3. Actual results: Playback skips intermittently. Expected results: Does this happen every time? No. I'm not sure exactly what is causing the playback issue. Other information: It would be nice if there was an option to increase the audio buffer size.
Why do you think this is related to a completely different application that (as far as I know) doesn't use sound at all? Does this happen in any other applications, particularly GStreamer applications? Which output device do you have configured for 'music and movies' in the GNOME sound preferences? Do you have crossfading enabled in rhythmbox?
Well, as rtorrent goes, clearly it is just a guess, but basically that is the only thing that has changed on my system in the last day or so. I also have the network monitor applet running, and it seems that whenever I notice a skip there is some amount of network activity. Also, the rtorrent and music files are source from the same XFS volume. Not sure about Gstreamer applications in generally. I really don't use any others except Pidgin I believe. Can you recommend any other ones to try? "Music and Movies" is set to Autodetect. I will try selecting PulseAudio directly and see if I notice any improvement. Crossfading is disabled.
You could try totem, or just run 'gst-launch-0.10 playbin uri=file:///path/to/file.mp3' in a terminal.
Yes, skipping is present in Totem as well.
OK, sounds like this is a GStreamer problem. What version of GStreamer and the various plugin packages are you using?
Please close this issue. Looks like it was caused by a bad PulseAudio config on Ubuntu. The following link outlines the steps to fix this issue. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578 Also, there was a problem of not belonging the the 'pulse-rt' group.