mpg321 scratchy with ALSA, fine with OSS
 

Hi,

I tried playing a few mp3s with mpg321, and the default options produce a good amount of distortion (mainly scratching) during playback.... The file I tried to play was encoded at VBR-High, but mpg321 displayed it as a 64kbps file! I initially thought that maybe the 'wrong bitrate' was causing the problem.... then, after performing a search here, I found that the -o oss option makes it work great.....

Now, I heard that OSS was being phased out, and is not going to be a part of the 2.6 kernel, and ALSA is 'superior' ..... I am pretty new to this stuff, so not even sure if OSS is entirely independent of ALSA...... All my other sounds play great with ALSA, and the media players in the GUI also sound great.... So, I was wondering if there were any other params I need to set, to make the mp3s work with ALSA.... I have a nForce2 board, with Soundstorm......

Also, the nForce2 boards allow me to have a 6 channel sound setup... alsamixer also gives me the option of using the 'Line-in' and 'Mic' as outputs.... BUT, I cant enable either of them in the mixer.... any ideas why???

Thanks,
Raghavan

oh, and this isnt related to the other query at all, but would any of u be kind enough to point me to a Download Manager for Linux..... or doesnt one exist as yet??? I need to pause and resume dwlds, coz my ISP is kinda sucky... :-) Console based, if available, are preferred....

cmon guys... help me out here.... *bump*

Mabey not the download manager you might be used to, but take a look at 'wget', it has a resume feature if your downloading via FTP for those of us with unreliable connections, depending on if the FTP server supports it, it also gets files via HTTP.

As for your 'alsa' question, have a look at 'aoss',

[man page]
aoss is a simple wrapper script which facilitates the use of the ALSA OSS compatibility library. It just sets the appropriate
LD_PRELOAD path and then runs the command.

This is useful in cases where routing settings (which can be made in your .asoundrc file) need to be applied to commands that use the
OSS API.
[/man page]

Tarts

thanks for the reply.... wget, will try that out tonight.... aoss, will check man for that..... but, I still dont get one thing... mpg321 has an option to use ALSA itself, while playing... this means that ALSA is compatible right? So, shouldnt the sound be fine with ALSA too? Instead of using OSS compatibility? Also, my VBR files are shown as 64kbps files... Should I be thinking about that?

I cant seem to get the sound any better, you could always try 'amp' instead.

Tarts

'any better' ... :-) nope, when I use ALSA, I get crackling noises... distortions.... when I use the -o oss option, its clear.... no idea what 'amp' is, but will go look around for info on that now... :-) still havent seen the man pages either, will do that too, and come back.... thanks again....

umm, ok... I used amp, and it works fine with all default options... I just dont know if its using ALSA, or OSS-emulation or OSS itself.... :-) but, I like amp... I thinm I'll just use this from now on... any reasons why mpg321 is a better option?