[gst-devel] esdsink clicks in esound stream

[Jeremy Avnet]

I'm creating an icecast2 stream with ices2 and raw audio provided by 
esdmon. esdmon duplicates the raw audio passing through esd (esound). 
If I feed esd with

	gst-launch filesrc location=music.ogg ! vorbisfile ! esdsink

the audio from the sound card sounds fine. However, audio from the 
icecast stream can be full of clicking. (The sort of clicks audible in 
discontinuous waveforms.) I say "can be full" because the amount of 
clicking depends on the kind of music playing. Quiet ambient music has 
almost no clicks. Louder music with more beats clicks a lot. A 
fantastic test song is "This Mess We're In" by PJ Harvey. For some 
reason, this clicks a lot right from the get go.

This clicking problem does NOT occur when I seed esound by either of 
the following:
* ogg123 -d esd music.ogg
* gst-launch filesrc location=music.ogg ! vorbisfile ! fdsink | esdcat

Also, I took icecast2 and ices2 out of the path by dumping esdmon 
output to disk and listening to it directly. It was clickful.

System specs:
Linux 2.6.0 i686
Debian testing/unstable
gstreamer 0.6.4-4
esound 0.2.29-1
libc6 2.3.2.ds1-11

FYI, the real point of all of this is to have an icecast stream of 
whatever rhythmbox is playing. I've come up with a temporary workaround 
using a fifo file and using filesink as the default sink, but it's very 
brittle, often cutting out when changing songs.

-- jeremy avnet / brainsik .:.