AudioCD playing in VL5.9rc3

[Freston]

Hi all!

I didn't know where to put this, as this is about multimedia, rc3 and n00bishness... 

Ehm... I made a bit of a mess. Long story short. I installed VL5.9rc3 on a friends ~700Mhz 128MB Compaq notebook. This worked far far better than XP-SP2 she had installed. Except for one odd thing. The CD drive would not play audio CD's very well. The sound stopped every six seconds or so, for a brief moment but irritating non the less.

I found errors in the logs concerning the /dev/hdb cdrom device, but I was able to overcome these errors by appending several ACPI kernel parameters. After that there where no more errors in the logs, but the sound problem while playing audio cd's remained.

Now I'm wondering. My machine plays audio perfectly well (I have a dual boot of 5.8SOHO and 5.9rc3). Why doesn't hers?

===

I must admit that I never intended to install anything on her machine, but she gave frequent complaints on how slow her box was. As you can well imagine running XP-SP2 with firewall and anti-virus on a machine like that isn't really smooth. VL5.9rc3 ran great! It wasn't until we tested audio that it appeared that she was missing some key functionality :s

[nightflier]

Which program are you using to play the CD's with?

[Triarius Fidelis]

And how does it go when you rip CDs?

[Freston]

Which program are you using to play the CD's with?

Xine, MPlayer (from the command line)
I also tried installing VLC from Slackware repo, but that didn't work at all. I did not troubleshoot this.

And how does it go when you rip CDs?

Perfectly, although I felt ripping was a bit slow. But then, ripping _is_ a bit slow. I could also play mp3's from USB stick, even though she has an USB 1.0 port. Audacious worked to, playing a list of mp3's.
Also, the drive seemed to access CD-ROMS just fine.

I was contemplating maybe a buffer problem, but I really venture outside my field of knowledge But I felt the effect was comparable to streaming video when the site's upload is poor, or there's a bottleneck along the way. Ehm...everyone who watches very recent blockbuster movies from a Japanese site knows this effect ... at least, that is what it reminded me off. it looked like it wasn't building a buffer. But as I said, I have no idea if audioCD's work like that. The same programs on my machine play CD's perfectly well.

[Triarius Fidelis]

I was contemplating maybe a buffer problem, but I really venture outside my field of knowledge But I felt the effect was comparable to streaming video when the site's upload is poor, or there's a bottleneck along the way. Ehm...everyone who watches very recent blockbuster movies from a Japanese site knows this effect ... at least, that is what it reminded me off. it looked like it wasn't building a buffer. But as I said, I have no idea if audioCD's work like that. The same programs on my machine play CD's perfectly well.

Thanks for reminding me to start watching the Naruto series today.

An experiment you can carry out to determine whether buffering is a problem is to play CDs in analog mode, that is, by pressing the play button on the unit or choosing analog mode in a player that supports it, like Audacious.

[Freston]

Thanks for reminding me to start watching the Naruto series today.

Heheh, sure! Enjoy! 

An experiment you can carry out to determine whether buffering is a problem is to play CDs in analog mode, that is, by pressing the play button on the unit or choosing analog mode in a player that supports it, like Audacious.

There is no play button on the unit
But I'll be sure to try the analog mode when I have my hands on that machine again. Thanx!!

[lagagnon]

I would say the CDROM drive is failing from a hardware point of view.

[nightflier]

Is it possible that DMA is not enabled for the drive?

What does "hdparm /dev/hdx" say? (replace hdx with whatever your drive is, like hdb, hdc or whatever).

[jduped]

I think something that hasn't been asked...

did it work before?  Was there play back issues in windows?

I'd agree that the issue could be down the DMA lines as I've seen it in windows.  I'm still a newb to vector but I know the common issues that hardware can show in windows...playback being one of them.

If you know someone with a similar model of drive, you could do the swap out and if the same issue persisted you know its not the drive as a possible hardware issue.  In the BIOS you could check settings make sure DMA is enabled, in the o/s I'm not much use.  Just thought I'd help as much as I could.

[Freston]

I would say the CDROM drive is failing from a hardware point of view.

did it work before?  Was there play back issues in windows?

Well,it seemed to work under Windows. Also, in hindsight, I seem to remember that .mp3's on CD worked better than .wma files and plain original CD's. But that's in hindsight, I'm not 100% on this one.

Is it possible that DMA is not enabled for the drive?

What does "hdparm /dev/hdx" say? (replace hdx with whatever your drive is, like hdb, hdc or whatever).

Ok! Thanks! I'll give that a try. With my limited knowledge of this at least the DMA sounds like a good candidate for causing this. I'm not really sure how to go about changing DMA settings, but a look at the BIOS might be a good place to start.

I don't know when I'll get to it. My friend lives halfway across the country (so it's a good hours drive ).

Just thought I'd help as much as I could.

Thnx! I appreciate it

[Triarius Fidelis]

Ok! Thanks! I'll give that a try. With my limited knowledge of this at least the DMA sounds like a good candidate for causing this. I'm not really sure how to go about changing DMA settings, but a look at the BIOS might be a good place to start.

If it's off (hdparm tells you in the 'using_dma' field of its output), you would add 'hdparm -d1 /dev/hdx' to /etc/rc.d/rc.local as root, where 'x' is the relevant drive letter as before.

[Freston]

Wow, thanks!

Would it be possible to do this remotely? Sorry, I've never done that before. It would speed up things significantly (and it would be cool, in a geekish sorta way )

I can get tha root password

[nightflier]

It can be done remotely. The computer needs to be running the ssh server, and be exposed to the internet. If there is a router with a firewall involved, it needs to forward port 22.

Question is, what would be easier: talking your friend through configuring for remote access, or dictating some commands for troubleshooting?

[Freston]

Question is, what would be easier: talking your friend through configuring for remote access, or dictating some commands for troubleshooting? 

Ah?!? oh.... ehm...  Yes, I see. You are absolutely right. Ahum. Nevermind. Carry on. Thank you.