I am sorry: could not find a prettier name for this thread. I have just installed xfce and I want to get off everything that is KDE. In KDE Amarok was playing fine. In xfce xfmedia is buggy. That is it plays the song but the sound comes out in an intermittent way. So, I get half a second of song, quart a second of pause and so on. As xfmedia is based on xine, I believe the problem has to be solved at its level. Xine was always buggy on my computer - an old Dell; 400 MHz and 256 Mb. That is why I always liked mplayer - almost no problems. I understand that there is no way to make xfmedia use mplayer as engine.

But what can I do to make xine play well?

I will mention that my sound card NeomagicMedia 256 has definite problems with alsa. Yesterday I tried to change the sound card module to the alternative one - the one that supports alsa - and the computer refused to boot. It hanged at the moment of initializing the alsa service. All this on a fresh Mandriva 2006 install. I have no idea how, but I managed to solve this myself: find the configuration file for modprobe and manually change the driver for the default one, so that at Linux boot alsa could not hang my computer. As soon as I got it booted, I stopped the alsa service and reinitialized the sound service, that is oss. So, now I have oss with xine giving me problems. At the same time xmms gives me the same headaches, as it crashes at start. I am tired of xmms crashing: it was similar with KDE on Mandrake 10.1 Official.

So, how can I make xfmedia or xmms play correctly using oss? Is there any way to make alsa work, if the latter is a better alternative to oss?

Maybe it would be best to change your soundcard to something like a creative soundblaster live or audigy. Soundblaster Live cards are very cheap and are well supported on Linux. OSS is being phased out so most distros that use a 2.6 kernel default to alsa. Another thing you may try is to change the sound system in xine and xmms to oss, but I am not sure if this will work.

It was concerning 01:00.1 Multimedia audio controller: Neomagic Corporation NM2360 [MagicMedia 256ZX Audio] and the alsa driver. I managed to get snd-nm256 work with my Dell CS 400 laptop by compiling the 2.6.14.4 kernel, which includes the alsa-1.0.10 driver, which in turn includes an AC 97 reset workaround (you should include in /etc/modprobe.conf the line: options snd-nm256 reset_workaround_2=1). Now the computer does not crash at all with the snd-nm256.

One more thing. Consider using
mplayer -ao oss
if you intend to use mplayer and the snd-nm256 module. It gives better results. Otherwise xine works well and Xfmedia is something at least worth trying (just as the entire Xfce 4.2 and soon 4.4 desktop environment).

I have XFCE 4.2 installed on NetBSD and I like it a lot. I'll checkout Xfmedia when I compile XFCE CVS on one of my linux machines.

After having tried Xfce I do not want to touch KDE and KDE applications any more. I look forward to Xfce4.4, as it will contain a nice - as people say - file manager (I still like emelFM2 very much; very flexible, still young but a decent replacement for Total Commander) and Xfburn. Not that K3B were that bad, neither Konqueror, but I do not have the KDE libraries installed so no K3B and no KDE programs on my computer. And the guys from Xfce do a very good job - a nice, clean and fast desktop environment that offers enough advanced features (some that KDE lacks). And as said earlier, if you look for a decent alternative to KDE or Gnome (haven't tried it for a long time, but when I did I was disappointed; although Gnome has several nice applications), try Xfce. About Xfmedia, I do not know why XMMS is so popular as it cannot compare with Xfmedia. Anyway, this is my personal opinion. Again, thanks reddazz.