Buffering Forever

rlkeeney

OpenAL
I was messing with the settings to see if anything changed.

The files are on a local disk.

I will try all possible audio outputs to be sure I didn't skip anything.

I also changed the buffer settings to the one you suggested.

rlkeeney

@jonas I tried all the listed outputs with these results:

OSS - Could not open audio device for playback.
Virtual Audio Sync - No Sound
Jack Server Resource not found - Plays - Hangs - Buffering 0%
Wrapper Audio Sync - Plays - Hangs
OSS v4 - Could not open audio device for playback.
Pulse Audio - Plays - Hangs
ALSA - Plays - Hangs - Buffering 0% - Killall strawberry
a2dp sink - Failed to link audio sink converter to audio sink with filter for a2dpsink

When Strawberry hangs, the quit option only removes the GUI. Strawberry is still running in the background, and the process has to be killed.

I am running Fedora release 39 (Thirty Nine) & MATE Desktop.

lamusica80

@rlkeeney Cool, I am also running Fedora Mate (but the latest Fedora release 40):

I have the same situation: sporadic crashes when changing songs and also the “buffering forever” error described above sometimes occurs.

In my opinion, however, Strawberry is the best music player there is and I think that these errors will soon be fixed.

jonas

It might be an issue specific to Fedora, I'll try intalling Fedora in VirtualBox and see if I can reproduce this issue.
Are you using PulseAudio, pipwire or ALSA?

Check with:

ps xua|grep pipewire

ps xua|grep pulse

lamusica80

@jonas

Here is the output:

user@mybox:~$ ps xua|grep pipewire
user 1548 0.0 0.4 355116 36000 ? S<sl 09:10 0:34 /usr/bin/pipewire
user 1551 0.0 0.5 371872 42908 ? S<Lsl 09:10 0:43 /usr/bin/pipewire-pulse
user 6833 0.0 0.0 227772 2432 pts/0 S+ 22:01 0:00 grep --color=auto pipewire
user@mybox:~$ ps xua|grep pulse
user 1551 0.0 0.5 371872 42908 ? S<Lsl 09:10 0:43 /usr/bin/pipewire-pulse
user 6839 0.0 0.0 227772 2284 pts/0 S+ 22:02 0:00 grep --color=auto pulse
user@mybox:~$

jonas

I tested both Fedora 39 and 40 with the default gnome installation in VirtualBox. Strawberry keeps freezing both with PulseAudio and Pipewire output. I tried to disable pipewire with (sudo systemctl disable --global pipewire / systemctl --user disable --now pipewire.{socket,service}), but pipewire just keeps enabling itself again, finally deleted the pipewire binary to make it stop. Then I tested plain ALSA output, but get the same issue.
Then I tested a new openSUSE Tumbleweed with Gnome default installation in Virtualbox, both pipewire, pulseaudio and alsa output works, no freeze and no playback issues.
Maybe report this to Fedora?

lamusica80

@jonas

Thank you for your effort in installing Fedora and testing Strawberry in that environment!
Good to hear that the error also occurs in the standard Gnome environment.
I had a fear that it is related to Mate, but fortunately that's not the case.

Not sure, if the error is in Fedora, because I have tested three other audio players (Amarok, Audacious and Parole).
Non of them causes errors when changings songs, even when I do it very quickly.

Only Strawberry and Clementine seem to have the problem.

So I don't know what to report to Fedora. If I report the bug in Strawberry, they will surely refer me back to the developer of Strawberry ...

rlkeeney

@lamusica80 said in Buffering Forever:

So I don't know what to report to Fedora. If I report the bug in Strawberry, they will surely refer me back to the developer of Strawberry ...

@jonas - Yes, we need to know what to tell them.

jonas

I tested a new installation of Fedora with KDE in VirtualBox, it does not seem to have the issue.
So I did some more testing on Fedora with Gnome too, and it seems like a deadlock issue when the pipeline is destroyed and gst_element_set_state is called, seems like a gstreamer bug to me.

lamusica80

@jonas
Another strange thing: I have Fedora 40 Mate also installed on a AMD Ryzen 3 and tested Strawberry there without any issues. I changed the songs very fast and everything runs like a charm.
My other two Fedora 40 Mate installations running on a Lenovo Thinkcentre M58 Core2Quad and a Lenovo T470 with an i5-6300U processor are causing this issue.

jonas

I built GStreamer 1.24.4 on Fedora 39 Gnome, the issue is then gone.
I also notice if I change strawberry to use the old playbin2 instead playbin3 the issue is also gone.
So there seem to be a bug in GStreamer 1.22 with playbin3, but for some reason it only appears to be an issue when using gnome.
In the meantime Fedora 40 have available GStreamer 1.24.4 in their repositories, so I've tested Fedora 40 with Gnome and the issue is resolved there too.
For Fedora 39 you can try this development build of strawberry: https://builds.strawberrymusicplayer.org/fedora/39/strawberry-1.0.23-2.179.g8a27c6a5.fc39.x86_64.rpm

lamusica80

@jonas
Good news: today gstreamer1-1.24.4-1 was rolled out by the Fedora Team and everything works fine now on my good old Lenovo M58
So you were right: the error was in gstreamer and not in Strawberry!
Thank you for your excellent work!

However, on my T470 I can't play any music with Strawberry and with Parole music player (both abend immediately). Audacious and Amarok have no issues.

But that's no problem, as I use my M58 with the 7.1 surround card for listening music.

collapsinghrung

Just informationally, I have this problem on windows. It's less common than the problem of constant spontaneous pausing, though.

rlkeeney

@jonas I upgraded Fedors from 39 to 40 and it seems to be fixed.