Hello all,

I have an external hard drive working on USB 1.1 speed (the drive is capable of USB 2.0 but it seems my ancient Thinkpad only has USB 1.1 hub). It seems that the speed is not good enough to playback straight from that drive - everytime the drive\'s read light is on there are low, but distinct artifacts in the sound - in amaroK this happens every five seconds or so . Concurrently reading something else from the drive makes the problem worse.

It seems that the actual read speed from the drive is something between 1.1 and 1.4 megabytes per second, so in theory playback could work...

I know next to nothing about Linux sound systems, but I\'m guessing the sound engines have settings I could try tweaking - like increasing caching or something? Could just switching to another engine help?

Any help would be very much appreciated.

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System info:

IBM Thinkpad 600E
LaCie 160GB USB hard drive (formatted as ext2)
Yoper Linux
Amarok 1.2.2, with arts

Try using gstreamer or xine engine. Those SHOULD work better.

I don\'t know much about USB hard-drives but perhaps you mounted it with lower speed? Can you copy the data off fastly?

Thanks for the speedy reply!

I\'ll have to look into installing other engines.

The device is visible as USB 2.0, lsusb -v says the drive is bcdUSB 2.00, but unfortunately the same line for the hub is bcdUSB 1.10. The speeds I mentioned (1.1 - 1.4 Mb/sec) were from actual tests (copying data off the USB drive), and that\'s pretty close to what I would have suspected a USB 1.1 was capable of.
I guess it\'s possible that the hub is actually 2.0 and it\'s just not recognised correctly, but I don\'t really believe that -- like I said the laptop is ancient.

I compiled a version of amaroK with gstreamer and xine -- no luck, I get the same \"scratches\" I got with arts. . .

Well, to read MP3 tags I believe the whole MP3 has to be loaded. This is likely the issue.

Hi eean, thanks for helping out. Could you open that comment up for me a little bit - what exactly do you think is the problem?

You see, the drive light flashes every 5-10 seconds and at the same time there is a small artifact in the sound. My guess was that there is a buffering problem -- engine starts reading \"the next block\" too late to be able to play smoothly.

If this was related to whole mp3s (or oggs in my case) being read, then this probably shouldn\'t happen every five or ten seconds.