Rhtyhmbox stops playing music on .ogg & .flac

[BillGradwohl]

I have a large library of music that consists of mp3, ogg and flac files. Older rhythmbox versions prior to the one in F17 treated these file formats equally. The version in F17 seems to stop when it hits an ogg or flac file.

Music is playing and then silence. Every time I check on what file its stuck on its either .ogg or .flac.

The PLAY button is depressed, the title bar says its playing, but there is no movement of the progress indicator or sound occurring. Hitting the PLAY button simply causes it to indicate everything is paused. Hitting it again says its playing, but its not.

If I double click the actual sound file, it starts right up and plays normally. When the song ends, and the next one begins, if that next one is mp3, it works. If its .ogg or .flac it stops till I double click the song.

Anyone else seeing this?

[robertdaleweir]

Originally Posted by BillGradwohl

I have a large library of music that consists of mp3, ogg and flac files. Older rhythmbox versions prior to the one in F17 treated these file formats equally. The version in F17 seems to stop when it hits an ogg or flac file.

Music is playing and then silence. Every time I check on what file its stuck on its either .ogg or .flac.

The PLAY button is depressed, the title bar says its playing, but there is no movement of the progress indicator or sound occurring. Hitting the PLAY button simply causes it to indicate everything is paused. Hitting it again says its playing, but its not.

If I double click the actual sound file, it starts right up and plays normally. When the song ends, and the next one begins, if that next one is mp3, it works. If its .ogg or .flac it stops till I double click the song.

Anyone else seeing this?

Hi BillGradwohl
I have Rhythmbox working on F17 Kernel 3.4.4-3.fc17.x86_64 on Gnome 3.4.2 . Rhythmbox is version 2.97. I am able to play my 'flac' collection without incident. As well it plays 'mp3'. I do not use 'ogg' so I cannot tell you about that format.
I do not run 32 bit distro's but if you are on 64 bit F17, the above may help you. I can provide other information if you wish. Cheers...

[BillGradwohl]

I'm on x86_64 completely patched every morning.

I also noticed that suddenly a song started playing from somewhere in the middle of the song.

I use music as background noise, and sometimes don't notice the quiet when things just stop. I just noticed the start of a .flac song but 2 minutes into the title, not from the actual beginning.

The part that gets me is the play button is non functional. It flips the title bar to saying paused and has just the song title up when its supposed to be playing, but there is no movement or sound. Only if I double click the song will it start up and function normally.

I'm not certain it has anything to do with file formats, but I've never noticed it to stop on any of the mp3's.

This box was working fine on F16. I upgraded to F17 last night with an absolutely fresh install. I never upgrade - I nuke all drives and install from scratch. Everything else is working as expected.

I've had lots of trouble with rhythmbox on a 32 bit netbook, I believe running F16. It takes 5 to 10 attempts to get rhythmbox up and running. It fails core dumps and then like magic starts and stays up. Everything also on that box works normally. Just rhythmbox messes up on startup.

[Dutchy]

Do you have crossfading enabled?
Every time I do that I'll experience lockups.

[robertdaleweir]

Originally Posted by BillGradwohl

I'm on x86_64 completely patched every morning.

I also noticed that suddenly a song started playing from somewhere in the middle of the song.

I use music as background noise, and sometimes don't notice the quiet when things just stop. I just noticed the start of a .flac song but 2 minutes into the title, not from the actual beginning.

The part that gets me is the play button is non functional. It flips the title bar to saying paused and has just the song title up when its supposed to be playing, but there is no movement or sound. Only if I double click the song will it start up and function normally.

I'm not certain it has anything to do with file formats, but I've never noticed it to stop on any of the mp3's.

This box was working fine on F16. I upgraded to F17 last night with an absolutely fresh install. I never upgrade - I nuke all drives and install from scratch. Everything else is working as expected.

I've had lots of trouble with rhythmbox on a 32 bit netbook, I believe running F16. It takes 5 to 10 attempts to get rhythmbox up and running. It fails core dumps and then like magic starts and stays up. Everything also on that box works normally. Just rhythmbox messes up on startup.

Hi BillGradwohl
Looks to me like you have done all the proper things, I do not do upgrades but totally new installs as well. Have you tried to remove rhythmbox (yum remove rhythmbox), then (yum clean all) and then reinstall (yum install rhythmbox)?
Not sure whether this would, in any way, help your situation but it may be worth a try. Cheers...

[BillGradwohl]

Dutchy: You must be referring to the 32 bit box. I have employees that use it so they could have turned something on. I'll check it but I don't even know what cross fading is.

As for the real problem on my software development machine, I bugzilla'd it. I watched it for several hours and discovered some traits that indicate its a bug of some sort. You can read the entire long description there. Very strange.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=837719

[buddha]

Fedora 17 x64

I've had this problem in Rhythmbox, and also similar problems in Amarok where the next song in a playlist just stops playing.

Have not found a solution, but at least a workaround for Rhythmbox that seems to work so far,

In Rhythmbox Preferences | Playback, set the Crossfade Duration to 0.2 seconds, and restart Rhythmbox.

I found this workaround here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...io/+bug/978604

[BillGradwohl]

Thanks for the link.

I read through all the comments. Obviously, various people have experimented and "think" they know of some triggering mechanism, as do I. I always found the issue against a .flac or .ogg file. Never against an .mp3 . Does that prove anything - no. I just provide my 2 cents as these folks have provided theirs.

Clearly this is a bug of some sort and that's why I bugzilla'd it. Rhythmbox is one of the most error prone pieces of software I've ever run across. I wish there was a better tool under Gnome.

My work around was to convert my offending files to .mp3 which is what they were originally when I copied them from the original CD's. It's been error free ever since.

Along the way I also added the necessary meta tags to all my music files to attempt to use the "ReplayGain" Plugin in Rhythmbox.

I ran :
mp3gain -s i *.mp3
against all my music directories. It took all day to finish.

I'm not sure that's working as I still have some files that are very low volume compared with others. Time will tell.

Again - Thanks for the link. It's good to know I'm not alone on this.

[mschwendt]

Originally Posted by BillGradwohl

Rhythmbox is one of the most error prone pieces of software I've ever run across.

http://bugz.fedoraproject.org/rhythmbox doesn't look too well.

I wish there was a better tool under Gnome.

There are other audio players. You are not forced to use Rhythmbox.

[OlivFedora]

I do have some problems too, usually I play randomly my music (mostly mp3, some ogg, very few flac). It works mostly fine.

Then I disable the random and start to play sequentially. For some unknown reasons Rhythmbox freezes when starting the next song (next song of the album, in the same directory), then I have to force-quit it and starts again. Sometime I'm unable to listen more than 2 songs. sometime it works fine.
I couldn't find any reasons behind this problem.
It seems to get worse with time.
If I launch it with the command line and the noupdate option it works better, but not perfectly.

To be honest it drives me crazy.

[BillGradwohl]

mschwendt

No one is forced to use anything. That's pretty obvious. I just can't find anything that's any better all things considered.

Rhythmbox has the feature set an audio player should have in my opinion. I haven't found another native player under Gnome that can match it. I tried Amarok and other tools under KDE but can't seem to like their design.

From one release to the next Rhythmboc appears to have an ever increasing number of issues. Is it spaghetti code that's now just unmaintainable? Were design choices made years ago that are now proving to be problematic? I don't know what the problem is, but the end result is certainly not improving over time.

[Yora0]

I have the same problem with Amarok. Also, this seems to be a common bug that has been around since Fedora 11 in 2009 and has also been reported by Ubuntu users with KDE, with a variety of players.

In my case, it affects mp3s (nut sure about others, don't have that many) and it almost always makes tracks being stuck at 0:03, but sometimes at other points as well.
I also have the "play button being stuck" effect.
I had the problem since I first used Fedora in May, but it has become a lot more frequently in the last couple of days, so I suspect some recent update made things worse.

[marko]

Originally Posted by BillGradwohl

Rhythmbox has the feature set an audio player should have in my opinion. I haven't found another native player under Gnome that can match it. I tried Amarok and other tools under KDE but can't seem to like their design.

Another option is Clementine, it's a fork of Amarok but it maintains the old Amarok 1.x look and feel so it's quite different from Amarok 2.x

[OlivFedora]

I changed my computer recently, and now use Fedora 17 64bits (it was a 32 bits before). No problems anymore !
Is it because it's 64bits or because the CPU is more powerful ? No idea...

[jongkind]

Had the same problem. Cross fading (duration 0.3 seconds) solved the problems that I had.