After being frustrated, by the bad sound quality of xmms + arts, I downgraded the xmms-arts plugin back to 0.4-r6 and the sound is ok again. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
could you please provide us with the output of 'emerge info' Also, what version of arts are you using? What sound card? What is the arts output configuration (ALSA, OSS, etc).
Okay, here is the info: (again, with xmms-arts-0.4-r6 it now sounds okay. Upgrading to 0.6 and it sounds horribly wrong) ALSA sound card: via82xx lspci: Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 30) cat .asoundrc: pcm.via82xx { type hw card 0 slave.pcm "dmix" } ctl.via82xx { type hw card 0 } cat /etc/modules.d/alsa --start-- alias char-major-116 snd alias char-major-14 soundcore alias snd-card-0 snd-via82xx alias sound-slot-0 snd-via82xx alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss alias /dev/mixer snd-mixer-oss alias /dev/dsp snd-pcm-oss alias /dev/midi snd-seq-oss options snd device_mode=0666 cards_limit=1 # this finally removed the crackling noise on all sounds options snd-via82xx dxs_support=2 --end-- kde-base/arts-1.1.5 KDE - Control Center: Sound System: Sound I/O: ALSA + Enable full duplex sound, 16 bits Sound quality + 348 milliseconds Audio Buffer Size emerge info: --start-- Portage 2.0.50_pre21 (default-x86-1.4, gcc-3.3.2, glibc-2.3.3_pre20040117-r0, 2.4.22-gentoo-r5) ================================================================= System uname: 2.4.22-gentoo-r5 i686 Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 - M CPU 2.00GHz Gentoo Base System version 1.4.3.12 ccache version 2.3 [enabled] Autoconf: sys-devel/autoconf-2.59 Automake: sys-devel/automake-1.7.8 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CFLAGS="-march=pentium4 -O3 -mmmx -msse -msse2 -mfpmath=sse -funroll-loops -fprefetch-loop-arrays -pipe" CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" COMPILER="gcc3" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3.1/share/config /usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/share/config /usr/share/texmf/dvipdfm/config/ /usr/share/texmf/dvips/config/ /usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/config/ /usr/share/texmf/tex/platex/config/ /usr/share/texmf/xdvi/ /var/lib/jboss /var/qmail/control" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/env.d" CXXFLAGS="-march=pentium4 -O3 -mmmx -msse -msse2 -mfpmath=sse -funroll-loops -fprefetch-loop-arrays -pipe" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="autoaddcvs buildpkg ccache sandbox" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://gentoo.inode.at/ ftp://gentoo.inode.at/source/" MAKEOPTS="-j2" PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage" PORTDIR_OVERLAY="" SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" USE="X alsa apm arts artswrappersuid avantgo avi berkdb cdr crypt cups dvd dvdr encode foomaticdb gd-external gdbm gif gphoto2 gpm gtk2 idea imap imlib java javascript jpeg kde libg++ libwww mad memlimit mhash mikmod mmx motif mozilla mpeg mysql nas ncurses nls nvidia oci8 odbc oggvorbis opengl oss pam pda pdflib perl png pnp python qt quicktime readline ruby samba scanner sdl slang spell sse sse2 ssl tcltk tcpd tetex tiff truetype usb vim-with-x x86 xml2 xmms xv zlib" --end--
Have you tried this with arts 1.2.0? Also, can you try changing your CFLAGS to this: CFLAGS="-march=pentium4 -O2 -pipe" CXXFLAGS="-march=pentium4 -O2 -pipe" to see if that fixes it? If it does fix it, can you try your origional flags without the -mfpmath=sse please. I'm placing bets on that as the culprit...
As soon as I get rid of bug #41643 I will contiune my tests.
Ok, this is really an upstream problem... xmms-arts is not maintained, an arts is terrible in general
You might want to try 0.7.1
Nice. The new version (0.7.1) sounds correct again!
closing...