Bug 376644

Summary:	Amarok (2.8.90), Fedora25, please increase 'nice' level to stop choppy music
Product:	[Applications] amarok	Reporter:	Jose Da Silva <Digital>
Component:	general	Assignee:	Amarok Bugs <amarok-bugs-null>
Status:	RESOLVED DOWNSTREAM
Severity:	normal	CC:	rdieter
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	2.8.90 (2.9 beta)
Target Milestone:	2.9
Platform:	Fedora RPMs
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Jose Da Silva 2017-02-18 22:41:11 UTC

Fairly fresh install of KDE-Fedora25, playlist is currently the default song on Amarok, and a CDrom inserted into the CD drive. Commercial music "Genesis".

While trying to play music from the CD, running into problem where Amarok is not able to keep-up, and therefore the music plays "choppy".

A temporary solution to my problem is to open-up a Konsole terminal and run amarok as:
nice -10 amarok
This appears to stop choppiness and has been playing CDrom music smoothly and consistent with various CDs.
I've also been running another konsole terminal with
nice 10 boincmgr
at the same time and amarok continues to play smoothly even though boinc is number crunching 100% in the background.
"top" shows 90% cpu crunching on boinc, and 5% for Amarok.

I suspect developers running modern computers with multiple cores won't see this, but users running slower/older computers are likely going to "hear" skipping/choping/breaks.

I don't think the amarok gui needs to be scheduled higher, but the audio sections involved will need to have the nice scheduling upgraded.

Comment 1 Myriam Schweingruber 2017-02-19 15:13:54 UTC

Please report tis to your distribution, it's not for the individual applications to change priorities in a system, this needs to be balances in a distribution to take into account all factors.