Hello, Gentoo. Happy New Year!
On my (no longer quite so) new PC, I've still not managed to get audio CDs to play properly. Originally I was using the program aqualung, but that gave a constant crackle on top of the music, making it unusable. (But it was fine on my old PC.) I've since moved to deadbeef (officially called DeaDBeeF), which though much better is still not right. What I get now on playing a CD is: (i) the first track of the CD gets ~6 seconds of crackle at the start; (ii) at each subsequent track (regardless of whether there are any actual gaps between the tracks) there is about 2 seconds of crackle at the beginning; (iii) if I pause the playback and restart it, there is no extra crackle; (iv) on moving the playback to a random part of the track, I get the ~6 seconds of crackle; (v) there are random moments of crackle in the middle of tracks, too, often ~6 seconds after an audible drive head movement. I've spend quite some time trying to modify deadbeef's source to eliminate the beginning of track crackle, so far without success. However, one thing I did try was to double the sampling speed from 44,100 samples/sec to 88,200 in deadbeef's settings menu. This doubled the speed of the music, putting it up an octave; useless for listening. However, doing this gave only ~3 seconds of crackle at the start of the CD. This strongly suggests that my problem is at the CD end of the chain, not the ALSA end. I've come to suspect that I have a fault in the DVD drive that I'm using for this. When I use it to record a DVD+RW disk with backup stuff, it usually takes quite some time before it recognises the first ?sector on the disk, after which it records the rest of the image correctly, without problems. Does anybody know if there are any programs I could use to test my DVD drive? If so, please tell me about one. Such a program would be preferable to the alternative of hoiking the DVD drive out of my old PC and connecting it up to the new. (I'm no longer an enthusiast of dismantling PCs.) Any help here would be most welcome. Thanks! -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
