You know when you have audio files which contain annoying little sounds which sort of sound like "chik"? What that called?

Anyway, now that I've begun listening to my music on Linux, I notice some of these audio files have these "chik" sounds in them. I never noticed this in Windows, because I guess foobar2000 detected them and covered them up. However, they're clearly audible with Amarok, using both arts and the xine engine. I have not used the gstreamer engine, however. Does anyone know if gstreamer would produce any different results?

Mplayer, however, does not produce these sounds. Would it be possible at all to add some sort of mplayer-engine support or something along these lines as to improve upon this aspect of audio playback?

Sorry if it sounds like I don't know what I'm talking about. I really don't. All I know is I'm hearing these sounds and they're driving me nuts.

mplayer, unlike xine, isn't split up between its UI and its underlying engine very well. So adding mplayer to the list of amaroK engines would be kind of hacky I think. If you've ever used the mplayer frontends like kmplayer you would see what I mean.

Do these chiks (no word for em that I know of) happen at the same place in the music? In other words, are you sure its the files? Sounds to me like arts and xine add the chiks (as opposed to foobar and mplayer removing them). I would try killing artsd and using Xine. And yes, gstreamer could just work without problem.

I actually get chiks from the sound in vmware. I'm not really sure why, but its Linux sound support is kind of primitive I think.

These sounds are called 'glitches' (like in the Matrix ) and they are the result of errors while decoding the sound file. It should not have anything to do with the playback engine, but more with the decoder engine/library used.
Maybe your Windows counterpart was better at covering them up on the fly. In any case, you could try recompressing these files using software that covers up the glitches (albeit at a slight quality loss because of the 2nd compression).

Ah, you answered at the same time

eean wrote:

I actually get chiks from the sound in vmware. I'm not really sure why, but its Linux sound support is kind of primitive I think.

VMware produces skips, something else completely. They are short interruptions in sound playback and likely to be results of the VM engine not being able to pass sound chunks from the virtual sound card to the real one fast enough.