[nas] Re: BOUNCE nas at radscan.com: Non-member submission from [Scott Presnell <srp at tworoads.net>]

[Jon Trulson]

> Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 12:38:20 -0800
> From: Scott Presnell <srp at tworoads.net>
> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; NetBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030116
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> To: "Greg A. Woods" <woods at weird.com>
> CC: nas at radscan.com, netbsd-help at netbsd.org, pgf at foxharp.boston.ma.us
> Subject: Re: debugging help: nas enabled mpg123 sounds slow and scratchy?
> References: <3E5FAE43.50401 at tworoads.net> <m18oqPe-000B3KC at proven.weird.com>
> In-Reply-To: <m18oqPe-000B3KC at proven.weird.com>
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>

	BTW: Scott, your messages to the nas mailing list are bouncing
because you are not subscribed...

> Greg A. Woods wrote:
> > [ On Friday, February 28, 2003 at 10:45:23 (-0800), Scott Presnell wrote: ]
> >
> >>Subject: debugging help: nas enabled mpg123 sounds slow and scratchy?
> >>
> >>I'm running NetBSD 1.5.2 with NAS 1.6 as compiled from the
> >>NetBSD package system, and I'm trying mpg123-nas also
> >>from the package system (Paul: I'll say upfront that I've
> >>tried w/ and /wo your audio_nas.c patches)
> >
> >
> > First off:  What CPU are you using?  How much RAM do you have?  Is your
> > system paging while playing MP3s?
>
> cpu0: Intel Pentium III (Coppermine) (686-class), 996.79 MHz
> total memory = 255 MB
> avail memory = 233 MB
> using 3294 buffers containing 13176 KB of memory
>
> (but this is my test machine, host A below is a PPro with 64M)
>
> No paging.
>
> (for later down:)
> 100BaseTX ethernet via HP switch. Everyone running full duplex on
> fxp and ex NetBSD ethernet drivers
>

	Should be ok...

> > Secondly:  Why are you trying to play MP3s via NAS to the same host
> > you're running mpg123 and the NAS server on?  (I'm not saying that's
> > wrong, or that it won't work -- I just want to know your rationale
> > because unless there some reason you didn't mention clearly then why
> > would you spend all those extra resources needed to do it that way?)
>
> Path of least resistance:
>
> The mpg123 I want to replace runs as a "service" (part of a house audio
> system) but it ties up /dev/audio. I'd like to use festival on the same
> audio port, but without stop/starting the mpg123 service. The easiest
> way to go about doing this, since festival uses NAS, was to convert to
> using the NAS version of mpg123.  I was hoping eventually to recompile
> KDE/artsd with NAS support as well.

	Yes, I use xmms with the nas plugin for this exact same reason -
so that other audio apps (like festival) can share the audio hardware...

>
> > FYI I've not had any problem with mpg123-nas when playing to my NCD HMX.
> > I even had some success when running the player on an SS1+.
>
> I just now checked from host A, and with a different audio card,
> I have the same audio quality issues running mpg123-nas from a remote
> host, to my workstation where nasd is running, and the same if I reverse
> the client and server hosts.
>
> And now, unfortunately, to add to the story...
> With some .wav files from host A to my workstation, auplay also shows
> the same poor audio quality issues...
>

	To get this straight... You are getting these dropouts and
samplerate problems with nasd no matter which machine it's on, and no
matter what data you send to it?  Is it only ssamplerate problems, or
are you getting dropouts as well?  Can you use auplay to send a 16b stereo
wav to the nasd server?  Is that messed up as well (local or remote)?

> So now I'm thinking it's nasd... am I outside the expected performance
> parameters of nasd?

	No - it should work just fine.  What sound card are you using?
Sometimes tuning the parameters in /etc/nas/nasd.conf can help (fragsize,
numfrags, etc).  On some audio hardware (an ISA soundblaster) I had to
reduce the output samplerate to 22Khz to get acceptable performance (no
dropouts).  No problem with the PCI variants though - runs at full
44.1Khz, 16b stereo...

-- 
Jon Trulson    mailto:jon at radscan.com
ID: 1A9A2B09, FP: C23F328A721264E7 B6188192EC733962
PGP keys at http://radscan.com/~jon/PGPKeys.txt
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