Adjust for Audacious drop-outs?

[John Hupp]

On 5/20/2015 4:34 PM, Aere Greenway wrote:
> On 05/20/2015 01:58 PM, John Hupp wrote:
>> On a 14.04.2 i386 desktop with a P4 @ 3.0GHz + Hyperthreading and 
>> 2GB, I find that Audacious skips/drops out a lot at the beginning of 
>> a CD track (or MP3), then after the first 30 seconds or so the 
>> problem decreases and is only occasional (perhaps 1-2x minute).
>>
>> Starting from the default settings for everything, I increased the 
>> buffering from 500 ms to 1000, 1500, 2000 then 3000).  There was some 
>> improvement but the problem did not disappear.
>>
>> By contrast, playback by VLC Player (granted, a heavier program) was 
>> as smooth as butter from the first note on both CD's and MP3's.
>>
>> Can I solve the Audacious problem with further settings changes?
>>
> John:
>
> This problem is easy to solve, but it is not obvious to do what you 
> need to do.
>
> What you need to do, is within Adacious, get to its menu.
>
> Since I have the compact graphics 'skin' mode, I right-click on its 
> title-bar to get its menu.
>
> In that menu, select "Plugin Services", and within that selected 
> sub-menu, select "Play CD".
>
> If you play CDs that way, you get no drop-outs, at least, I get no 
> drop-outs using JACK.  I used to get the drop-outs you describe before 
> I learned this trick.
>

Thanks Aere.  I knew about Services: Play CD (there was an older bug in 
which pcmanfm failed to launch CD playback automatically, but simply 
opened Audacious; you had to click Services: Play CD from there).

But I have not tried JACK.  I'm using the default PulseAudio output.  
When I select JACK output, I get no output at all.  I suppose I need to 
install a package.  Do you know which one?

In the meantime, your prompt gave me the idea to try ALSA output, which 
is already installed.  In a one-track test, I got no dropouts, but the 
volume control had very little gradation -- went from too quiet to too 
loud in one step.