Hi folks, I have one observation to make about xmms & MacOS X 10.1, and one question to ask.
My observation is that xmms crashes almost immediately (at least for me) under MacOS 10.1. It was dodgy under 10.0.4 to my memory, but not this bad. However, the problem is in the esound daemon. If you launch esd manually and then launch xmms, then the problem goes away and things play properly. This is the esd that xmms launches automatically, if one is not already running: 13566 ?? Ss 0:00.12 esd -terminate -nobeeps -as 2 -spawnpid 13564 XMMS works fine if you run "esd -terminate -nobeeps -as 2 &". If you run this, then run xmms, then sound plays normally and esd quits when xmms stops playing through it (due to -terminate.) (Please note that this makes this fix annoying - as soon as you stop playback esd will quit and xmms will launch the crashy one when you resume playback, causing you to crash!!) the "-spawnpid" option is undocumented, but running esd manually with -spawnpid and the pid of the aterm the shell was running in caused that aterm to crash, so I'm guessing that option is undocumented for a reason and is the cause of xmms' crash. If other people are experiencing this same problem then I propose patching the esd plugin for xmms, to remove the "spawnpid" option (esd will still terminate when xmms terminates.) I haven't tried this myself, but I imagine it will eliminate the problem. Is this a job I can do myself (and submit the patch to the unstable tree) or should I email the package maintainer? My second question relates to the Darwin kernel and it's bad behaviour. I've noted, both in mpg123 and in xmms, that since I installed 10.1 it seems impossible to play mp3s in either without them skipping every time anything relating to the display happens (flipping windows in XDarwin, scrolling the dock, changing apps in Aqua...) I've reniced both xmms and esd to -20 which reduces the skipping but does not eliminate it. I've currently got them niced to -10 which makes it OK to work in a single app or in the X11 environment, but still skips when I do anything else (including popping up the dock!!) I tried just playing a tone from the tone generator input plugin, and it still skipped the same as before, so I take it this is neither a problem with hard disk access/caching nor an inefficient libmpg123 port. Does this make it a kernel problem? Can it be fixed? (Is there some kernel process you can renice up a few points?!?) Right now it reminds me of something I said to a friend after I tried out AudioActive (one of the very first MacOS mp3 players), playing an Abbott & Costello mp3 on my PowerMac in around 1996. "I think the multitasking is pretty good. I can type in Word without it skipping, as long as I don't save or use the menus." Any tips? Cheers, Angus -- _______________________________________________ Fink-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
