Bug 303667

Summary:	media-sound/shell-fm on PPC only produces hissing noise
Product:	Gentoo Linux	Reporter:	Nathan Phillip Brink (binki) (RETIRED) <binki>
Component:	[OLD] Library	Assignee:	Gentoo Sound Team <sound>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED
Severity:	normal	CC:	ppc
Priority:	High
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
URL:	https://trac.xiph.org/ticket/1397
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description Nathan Phillip Brink (binki) (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2010-02-06 03:28:32 UTC

I tried using the oss and the alsa plugins for libao and I only got hissing noise. For music which starts out quietly, the sound distortion appears to grow from nothing to complete noise in the first half-second of playing. For music with a definite beat, the beat is distinguishable in the hissing noise.

But I can't use shell-fm on my iMac because shell-fm depends on libao working. Older versions of shell-fm supported writing to /dev/audio (OSS) directly and that worked, so I'm convinced the error is in libao not respecting char-signedness or something ABI-specific like that.

My situation appears to be the same as that described at http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=265344 and http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=267621 .

Comment 1 Peter Volkov (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2010-02-06 16:21:40 UTC

Hm, debian bug reports were closed with fixed upstream, but it's hard to say what fixed this... https://trac.xiph.org/log/trunk/ao

Comment 2 Nathan Phillip Brink (binki) (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2010-02-16 23:14:17 UTC

It appears that https://trac.xiph.org/ticket/1397 is related.

Comment 3 Samuli Suominen (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2010-04-05 15:22:41 UTC

The upstream ticket was closed as fixed.   Try libao-1.0.0, now in portage.

Comment 4 Nathan Phillip Brink (binki) (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2010-04-06 00:51:51 UTC

(In reply to comment #3)
> The upstream ticket was closed as fixed.   Try libao-1.0.0, now in portage.

OK, I tried with libao-1.0.0. I'm not sure if anything changed anywheres or not, etc., but I installed vorbis-tools and noticed that ogg123 doesn't exhibit this issue. This probably means that the issue is with shell-fm.

I pulled shell-fm's git source and running make without any special arguments produced a shell-fm that still spurted out noise. Recompiling with the below command produced a working shell-fm, however:
$ CPPFLAGS=-DWORDS_BIGENDIAN=1 make clean all -j2

As shell-fm's build system seems to expect the user to determine the bitiness of his system, I guess the shell-fm ebuild will have to figure out if it should add -DWORDS_BIGENDIAN to CPPFLAGS or not.

Comment 5 Joe Jezak (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2010-04-18 00:23:16 UTC

Fixed in CVS, thanks for figuring out what the problem was. I added the flag WORDS_BIGENDIAN=1 whenever the arch is ppc.