Hi,
Is it possible to increase the buffer size for playing internet streams. I am behind a slow connection so i always use mplayer which provides enough buffer to play streams smoothly. However, amarok loses out connection only after a 1-2 seconds play.

cheers
Rajil

Good question! With aRts, things are complicated, since we have to do a weird indirection, using a proxy server, for extracting shoutcast metadata.

With the GStreamer engine I have much more control about the process, since amaroK does 100% of the transport itself. Dunno which engine you were using (always specify!), but try with Gst and report again.

Sorry, forgot to mention, i was using arts. But now i have switched to gstreamer now. Unfortunately, the situation does not change much. Infact, now when there is dropout, i can hear screeches.
Thanks

Rajil wrote:

Sorry, forgot to mention, i was using arts. But now i have switched to gstreamer now. Unfortunately, the situation does not change much. Infact, now when there is dropout, i can hear screeches.
Thanks

The stream buffer is currently 400kb big. I thought that's already a lot, but maybe it would need increasing for you. We could make this value configurable, but we try to keep GUI clutter low. Would it be acceptable as a non-GUI configurable option?

E.g., in amarokrc: Streaming Buffer = 400

Yes, bloating the GUI is not the best way. I would be more than happy if this parameter is introduced in amarokrc.
and please put this in the changelog
cheers
Rajil

Just wanted to add, i use a cache of 8192KB for mplayer

**Waiting for the next release with this feature**

Did this buffer feature make it into amarok 1.0.2 ?

cheers
Rajil

Rajil wrote:

Did this buffer feature make it into amarok 1.0.2 ?

No, 1.0.x development is halted.

In amarok CVS HEAD the buffer handling has been refined and should work better with bad connections. I recommend trying CVS, as it is pretty stable already. We're planning to release 1.1-beta1 in a few days.

Thanks I will try the CVS version. Is it possible to increase the buffer size in CVS?

cheers
Rajil

Rajil wrote:

Is it possible to increase the buffer size in CVS?

If increasing is still needed, you can easily change one constant in the source code to adjust the buffer size. And if that's needed I'll consider making it a real option. I'll wait for your report.

This concerns the gstreamer engine, btw. Xine handles streaming differently.

Hi Mark,
I tried out the cvs version of amarok. The new features rock but the buffer problem still persists. Strange enough i have only xine and gstreamer engines available only and no arts. I have been using xine and gstreamer refuses to work for me.
In the console i get a lot of messages like "stream == 0! what does that mean?!". I would like increase the buffer, can you please tell me which file to modify.

Thanks

Rajil wrote:

I tried out the cvs version of amarok. The new features rock but the buffer problem still persists. Strange enough i have only xine and gstreamer engines available only and no arts. I have been using xine and gstreamer refuses to work for me.

What I wrote about streaming is _only_ true for the gstreamer engine. With xine, streaming is currently handled completely differently.

Also, a streaming buffer size of 8192KB is ridiculous for audio. It would mean that you have to wait 8,5 minutes until the stream actually starts playing (with 128kbit). IMO you can't call this streaming any more. It's rather downloading and then playing.

Thanks for your reply. I have switched over to gstreamer after finding that it can get metadata from streams which i cant get using xine. Yes, 8192kb is too much of a buffer, but it is my mplayer default and i have not tried lower values as this works fine for me.
I would be happy if you can explain how to set the buffer for gstreamer. Currently, amarok status bar goes down to 50% every few seconds and halts the music.

cheers

I also have a buffer related question: Is it possible to change the buffer size for files read from the hard drive? I run the Linux kernel laptop-mode script on my iBook, and so most of the time my hard drive is in sleep mode. The problem is then that often when amarok wants to read some more data, it has to wait for the drive to spin up, and the sound pauses in the meantime.

So I'd like to play around with the buffer size, so see if that would fix it. Either I could make it very large, so that the time it takes to spin up the hard drive doesn't cause the music to lag, or I could make it very small, so that we are always trying to read data and the drive will not have time to spin down.