KMix Lockups, Freezes, and Performance

Recently I experienced serious problems with using KDE's audio system, which I eventually tracked to the program 'kmix.' The symptoms were extremely slow response on volume-changes and mutes. By slow, I mean taking a full minute or more to apply. Also, it was taking up 100% of the CPU sometimes for minutes at a time (when it was not responding). Thank goodness I have a quad-core.

I am not sure if the problem is the result of using KDE 4.6.0 or not, since it is very recent and it might have introduced some bugs.

Regardless, I eventually figured a solution to the problem: Quit kmix. You may need to actually kill the program. Next move (or delete or rename) the folder 'kmix' in the folder '~/.kde/share/apps/. Restart kmix, and it will recreate a default '~/.kde/share/apps/kmix/' folder with default settings.

This fixed my problem. Hopefully it will help with yours.

Convenient Audio Converter for Linux

I recently discovered a handy audio conversion program that does not have much publicity (mostly because the program is written by a French person, and not covered in any English websites I could readily find).

The program is called XCFA (X Convert File Audio). It supports a wide range of conversion for input and output formats, and when using it under Ubuntu, it offers the option to (attempt to) automatically install any missing dependencies (such as support for FLAC, AAC, etc). It has additional features besides conversion, but I won't cover those here.

The general use is to start the program, go to the Files tab, and import the music you want to convert. It analyzes the input files and presents you with your options for conversion. (If you open a lot of files, it can be a little slow, but it's fast when opening just a few.) It's pretty straightforward and this is one of the nicer audio conversion tools I have used since dBpoweramp back in Windows. (I would not quite call this dBpoweramp for Linux, but it's the closest I have used in years, and certainly a viable alternative.)

Included is a picture of me using it to convert a bunch of my flac files to MP3s.

It appears to be available in Ubuntu in version 9.10 Karmic or later, which does not surprise me too much as the program is fairly new.

PulseAudio - A new system to solve many problems

Overview
What PulseAudio is, and why it is great for Linux.

Forward
Someone once asked me why PulseAudio is being pushed and I only had some vague ideas why. This article briefly mentions some new reasons I did know. I thought you might be interested:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzIwMg

I have been reading up on PulseAudio and like I said before, if it becomes the standard (and I think it will) it will be great and solve a lot of the problems in Linux. Sufficient to say, if PulseAudio can do all that I have ever seen listed on websites for features, it will be the end all of sound systems for Linux. :)

Just to name a few features PulseAudio has that I like:

• Support for a far wider range of audio devices ( Bluetooth/Apple Airport)
• Flat volume support (similar to Vista's audio controls)
• On-the-fly reconfiguration of audio devices
• Native support for 24-bit samples.
• It will run on Windows, both natively if desired or through Cygwi.
• Support for allow networked sound (between Windows and Linux)
  

These last two two features are things I have personally desired from a sound system. Previously I had never successfully enabled transporting of sound across a network from a Windows Machine to a Linux machine. (The occasion for wanting to do this was that I had a Windows machine in my room, running games which I was controlling from my Linux desktop via Synergy. I did not want to setup a second pair of speakers to hear the games. I wanted to have the audio from that computer piped into my main desktop speakers.)

About two years ago, PulseAudio was rather unsupported (maybe even broken), at least in Ubuntu. Maybe it was the programs... or maybe it was the kernel. I don't know. It could have been both. But now most of my programs run PulseAudio just fine. I remember the annoying problems I would have with OSS audio in the past. This transition to PulseAudio is much less of a problem for me.

I suppose a user must need to be somewhat advanced to experience the occasional difficulties with software audio protocol conflicts and difficulties. I can safely tell you that I definitely experienced more problems with audio 6 years ago when I began to seriously use Linux. I also experienced more when I was using a wider variety of software.


In the past 6 years I have been watching, there has been larger move towards supported ALSA in most applications, and now support for PulseAudio seems to be coming along nicely. The best part of PulseAudio is that, to my understanding, as long the application uses ALSA, ARTS or ESD, all of those are wrapped under the PulseAudio umbrella.

So if PulseAudio is actually working on your system, the system is backwards and forwards compatible, and all sound play nicely together. Well done, huh?

Of course, there is the issue that PulseAudio will have more overhead than systems like ALSA, which of course has more overhead than OSS. Personally though, I seriously doubt this is going to even be noticed on desktops with Dual-cores and even more so as Quad-cores become commonplace. Also, we are not talking about a lot of overhead here, especially when the system is not doing much.