Hello, everybody. On Sun, Jan 04, 2026 at 12:29:00 +0000, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > Hello, Jack.
> Thanks for the reply! > On Sat, Jan 03, 2026 at 15:33:43 -0500, Jack wrote: > > On 2026.01.03 11:44, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > > > On Fri, Jan 02, 2026 at 15:44:06 +0000, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > [ .... ] > > > > I think I am just going to buy a new drive. At ~25 Euros, it's > > > > just not worthwhile trying all these things on the current one. > > > Well, I've bought and installed a new drive (made by ASUS) and it > > > hasn't helped in the slightest. :-( > > > Maybe modern DVD drives just aren't capable of reading audio CDs > > > properly. > > It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure I've successfully read audio CDs > > with a DVD reader. Can you find any documentation on the specific > > drive model you just bought? > Well, things have taken a turn for the better! I've discovered the > program xine, which plays audio CDs faultlessly. :-) Maybe I'm kidding > myself, but the sound quality seems better even than the sections without > crackle on deadbeef. So it's not my hardware which is at fault. > Looking at the C source code for xine, it seems it uses direct ioctl > calls to the kernel to read data from the CD. deadbeef instead uses > dev-libs/libcdio for this. Maybe there's some incompatibility between > libcdio and my hw/sw setup. I will be trying to pin this down in the > coming days/weeks. > > As a temporary workaround, you might consider copying the entire > > content of the CD to a folder, then play from local storage instead of > > directly from the disk. I've done this in the past with VLC, but just > > using a file browser should show each track as some sort of audio file. > I haven't tried this yet, but I intend to do so this afternoon (European > time). Thanks for the suggestion. I've just tried this, using xfce's thunar (file manager) which recognised the tracks on a CD as .wav files. I copied them to my home directory, then played them back in xine. There was a high level of crackle through the entire length of both tracks I copied. This was on an original non-ripped CD recorded around 1990. So, perhaps this copying used the same utility as aqualung. Maybe deadbeef takes ~6 seconds to fill its buffer sufficiently at the start of a CD after which it uses error correction of some sort. But it fails to maintain this buffer at track boundaries, hence ~2 seconds of crackle at the start of every track. Maybe. > [ .... ] > > Jack -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
