xmms only playing mp3 as root

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sat, 1 Jan 2011 01:23:38 +0000, Marko wrote:

> On Friday 31 December 2010 17:45:14 Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > On Fri, 31 Dec 2010 18:41:35 +0200, Johan wrote:
> > > On 12/31/2010 05:20 PM, Rick Sewill wrote:
> > > > For me, when I am logged in, as a normal user, I do have a file,
> > > > ~/.xmms/config, and the line in my file is
> > > > output_plugin=/usr/lib64/xmms/Output/libxmms-pulse.so
> > 
> > Which is the Pulse Audio output plugin for XMMS, which is only available
> > if you install the "xmms-pulse" package. That one is not installed by
> > default when installing the "xmms" package.
> 
> I can't help wondering why is this so? Pulseaudio is the default sound server 
> on Fedora, and xmms should include the xmms-pulse by default, and prefer to 
> use pa over alsa, also by default.

True. When Pulse Audio became the default, there was a suggestion made to
all audio player packagers to consider making Pulse Audio output the
default. Not mandatory, however, and only where a Pulse Audio output
driver was available. Further, during the early roll-out of Pulse Audio in
Fedora, there have been many problems and several audio players only
featured ALSA output, which worked by default due to Pulse Audio
intercepting the ALSA interface.

xmms-pulse is a separate package built from sources external to XMMS.
It would need circular dependencies to have "xmms" require "xmms-pulse"
and vice versa. Or it would be necessary to merge the two packages out
of convenience. xmms-pulse would need an active maintainer, however, as
it is lacking updates and fixes. Such a maintainer could backport fixes
from Audacious' pulse output plugin, but it is an amount of work.

XMMS has not been developed further in several years. Version 1.2.10 was
available already when Fedora did not exist yet. It has taken years
for a minor release 1.2.11 with a couple of fixes. That has been a few
years ago.

Meanwhile, successors of XMMS (forks like BMP) have started and died
again. But some have done a lot of development and are still actively
maintaining their code and developing it further while at the same time
listening to feedback of their users.
 
> As xmms is configured now, it uses alsa by default, which gets rerouted to pa 
> (via the alsa-pulseaudio plugin in pa), which uses alsa as a backend for 
> playback. From my perspective, this is plain stupid, xmms should just use pa 
> natively, and eliminate the alsa-pa-plugin. It is an unnecessary overhead, 
> IMO. And it also breaks the volume slider for xmms...
> 
> So what am I missing here? Is it time to bug the xmms maintainers/packagers?

IMO, it is time for the Fedora community to decide on the fate of XMMS in
the Fedora package collection. Any Fedora user, who still uses XMMS
despite the availability of many alternative audio players, ought to step
up and give the packages some love. From a distributor's perspective, it
would be more clever and convenient to just drop XMMS and its ancient
build requirements GTK+ 1 and GLib 1.