gnome-cd skips

[Jonathan Corbet]

Kjartan Maraas <kmaraas at broadpark.no> wrote:

> >Sometime over the last month, a rawhide update bestowed upon me a
> >version of gnome-cd which skips.  Bits of the audio drop out every 30
> >seconds or so.
>
> I filed this today because I was seeing skips with mixed data/audio CDs.
> Is the CD you played back by any chance in this category?
> 
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=168978

I have such CDs, but *every* CD I play skips, regardless of whether it
has data tracks or not.  So I don't think that's it.

I ran it under strace for a bit today.  As others have guessed, gnome-cd
is not actually dealing with the music stream itself; that goes direct
to the sound card from the play.  I see the gnome-cd process doing two
things: 

- Talking with the X server.  Not surprising.

- ioctl(20, CDROM_DRIVE_STATUS, 0x7fffffff) = 4

So now I'm beginning to wonder: might the real problem be a regression
in the kernel such that this ioctl() call perturbs a running CD drive?
*This* is the sort of problem I can try to track down (whereas what goes
on inside GNOME is a deep, dark mystery), so I think I'll try to carve
out a bit of time to dig further.

jon