Missing Audacious OSS Plugin

[mschwendt]

Originally Posted by sonoran

Until I ran the latest updates. Now Audacious fails to start.

$ audacious -V
main.c:461 [main]: Loading configuration.
main.c:465 [main]: Initializing signal handlers.
main.c:468 [main]: Handling commandline options, part #1.
main.c:479 [main]: Initializing plugin subsystems.
ALL OUTPUT PLUGINS FAILED TO INITIALIZE.
main.c:486 [main]: Handling commandline options, part #2.
main.c:489 [main]: Registering interface hooks.
interface.c:62 [interface_get_default]: Searching for an interface.
No interface plugin found.

Fortunately I cache everything during alpha-beta, so a downgrade fixed it.

PEBKAC?

I can no longer assume that you know what you're doing. The last Plugin ABI/API change in F-15 and F-14 has been in early Dec 2010 (to v17). In Rawhide (F-16 development), there have been several API changes, but the 2.5.x branch supports a range of plugin API versions (from v18 to v20).

[vsaua]

I also have to play Audacious through OSS-plugin, because have buggy ALSA driver for my soundcard and OSS loads cpu less than PulseAudio. In my FC13 I use audacious rpms from ATrpms repo. Try it.

[sonoran]

Thanks vsaua, I hadn't thought of that. I try to stick with the Fedora repos
whenever possible. If Fedora continues to try to make my life difficult, the
ATrpm is a possibility.

It's actually not very hard to enable the oss output plugin in the Fedora
sources, even if you don't know what you are doing.

The only thing that needs changing is the line in the spec file that reads
"--disable-oss". Make that "--enable-oss" and then use rpmbuild to rebuild
the package.

The most time-consuming part of this is installing all the development
packages for the various libraries. Once you have those in place it's pretty
quick. Also studying man rpmbuild - there are a lot of options to consider.
Fortunately most of them seem to produce a working result.

I also tried adding the line "--enable-oss4" in the spec file, but the oss4 plugin
causes Audacious to freeze up sometimes, either after playing a song or when
it comes to the end of the playlist. I think this plugin is a work in progress,
which is why it is disabled by default in the Audacious source code.

@mschwendt - definitely PEBKAC. I didn't mean to suggest that there was
anything wrong with the update. It just arrived on my system like an innocent
bystander coming upon a grisly crime scene.

My methodology is to keep hacking at a problem until either I fix it or everything
breaks - whichever comes first. In this case I had 3 different versions of Audacious
installed, numerous plugin directories...

I can keep all that straight but apparently yum cannot yet read minds.

I uninstalled and manually cleaned out everything, installed the new Audacious
packages, changed the audacious-plugins spec file to enable oss, ran rpmbuild.

Audacious works great with the oss output plugin. The oss4 plugin does not
work reliably. When it does work, I could see no apparent difference between
it and the oss output plugin.

Thanks for your time on this, and sorry if any feelings were bruised - I'm a
polemicist by nature.

[mschwendt]

And still nobody has requested the missing OSS driver in a bug report. It has not been built for several dist releases.

So, I'd say with ATrpms you've found an area of the Fedora package ecosystem that serves you well by providing a niche market plugin. Be happy about that!

The ATrpms changelog for Audacious makes a funny reading, though. Apparently patches from Fedora are copied randomly, and other times the packagers have jumped to severely broken releases in a short-sighted way, e.g. to 2.0.x and 2.3, not limited to missing plugins. Very strange, considering the bumpy road from 1.5.1 to 2.4, which required lots of patches plus work on bringing back some features. The changelogs of Fedora's audacious-plugins-2.2-38.fc13 and audacious-plugins-2.1-27.fc12 in koji are just the tip of the iceberg. The upstream devs have called the 2.4 release a first stable release branch with good reason, and that release really is tons better than the previous ones.

Originally Posted by sonoran

If Fedora continues to try to make my life difficult,

That's nonsense, unfortunately. To iterate, when I've taken over the packages, I've had lots of breakage to deal with in 1.5.1 already. Due to the player being ahead of several plugins. With Fedora disabling OSS by default, there has not been any time and interest left in dealing with another audio driver. Just look at how often the ALSA driver has been patched and even rewritten (and renamed temporarily), and the Pulse Audio has been removed temporarily due to problems, too. With the difference, that ALSA driver users have submitted several helpful bug reports, and nobody has complained about OSS before.

The most time-consuming part of this is installing all the development
packages for the various libraries.

You can run yum-builddep on the src.rpm, if you don't use mock or a buildsys.

Audacious works great with the oss output plugin.

I've reenabled it in Rawhide. For F-15 and F-14 it can return whenever those will need an update (or the test-upgrade to 2.5.x).

[vsaua]

Hello!

Just upgraded today from FC13 to FC14. Of course the upgrade process overwrite my audacious packages from ATrpm and this time I decided to rebuild the audacious-plugins from the srpm to enable OSS-plugin.

I didn't find this method elegant because:
1) As you mentioned I had to install more than 110 devel packages with 130MB - not very fine to keep them. And they will be always updated during "yum update" steal additional traffic and time.
2) Don't know what is the best way to update audacious - rebuild process cost time and attention. For now I've just add "exclude=audacious-plugins" in my yum.conf (possible "exclude=audacious*" needed).

So next time while playing with audacious I'll add ATrpms repo, put "includepkgs=audacios*" in the repo.conf and give a higher priority to it. Guess it'll be more convenient and not brake anything.

Originally Posted by sonoran

Thanks vsaua, I hadn't thought of that. I try to stick with the Fedora repos
whenever possible. If Fedora continues to try to make my life difficult, the
ATrpm is a possibility.

It's actually not very hard to enable the oss output plugin in the Fedora
sources, even if you don't know what you are doing.

The only thing that needs changing is the line in the spec file that reads
"--disable-oss". Make that "--enable-oss" and then use rpmbuild to rebuild
the package.

The most time-consuming part of this is installing all the development
packages for the various libraries. Once you have those in place it's pretty
quick. Also studying man rpmbuild - there are a lot of options to consider.
Fortunately most of them seem to produce a working result.

I also tried adding the line "--enable-oss4" in the spec file, but the oss4 plugin
causes Audacious to freeze up sometimes, either after playing a song or when
it comes to the end of the playlist. I think this plugin is a work in progress,
which is why it is disabled by default in the Audacious source code.

[mschwendt]

It's vice versa. The ATrpms audacious* packages are quite rude and replace Fedora's Audacious and even RPM Fusion's addon packages. Not just due to using the same package names, but due to extra "Obsoletes" tags that uninstall many separate plugin packages. Of course, any time Fedora ships a higher version, this upgrades ATrpms if they are older.

I don't see any room for cooperation here if the plan is not to extend Fedora with "forbidden stuff", but to replace Fedora packages and copy patches from Fedora's packages.

[sonoran]

Originally Posted by mschwendt

I've reenabled it in Rawhide. For F-15 and F-14 it can return whenever those will need an update (or the test-upgrade to 2.5.x).

Thanks very much. I got into trouble with ATRpms years ago and have never gone back.

I enabled Rawhide and got your new packages and the sdlout plugin worked fine in F15 with OSSv4.

I hesitate to mention this - you've been through enough already - but the recurring Playlist Editor bug has returned in the new version - can't scroll up or down through the list. They do seem to fix this fairly quickly each time it reappears.

Thanks again.

[mschwendt]

Originally Posted by sonoran

I enabled Rawhide and got your new packages

That's impossible, because today's (20110423) Rawhide report has not been announced yet.

and the sdlout plugin worked fine in F15 with OSSv4.

sdlout is a new driver for SDL, we've been talking about the "OSS Output Plugin". The plugin file name is OSS.so

I hesitate to mention this - you've been through enough already - but the recurring Playlist Editor bug has returned in the new version - can't scroll up or down through the list. They do seem to fix this fairly quickly each time it reappears.

First time I hear that. Do you have a link to a bug tracker ticket?

[sonoran]

What I got from Rawhide was audacious-2.5.0-1.fc16.x86_64 and plugins, and the sdlout output plugin works with OSSv4 with no other configuration than selecting it in Audacious Preferences.

The plugin file name is OSS.so

I thought you had maybe renamed it to confuse me.

First time I hear that. Do you have a link to a bug tracker ticket?

This is actually a new form - in the past the problem I've had is that using the interface up or down arrow widgets would move randomly in the playlist instead of previous or next. With 2.5.0-1, nothing happens when the widgets are clicked, no movement at all. This is in the skinned interface.

Never filed a bug about this because the issue was annoying but not fatal - I don't use long playlists and by clicking a few times, eventually the right song would be selected. And, the bug always disappeared in an update or two.

The new form - no movement at all using the widgets, makes playlists less useful. One might as well just use the Add Files dialogue and keep it open.

[mschwendt]

The build in Rawhide is release -2.fc16.

Alternatively, you could downgrade to 2.4.5 from F-14 and F-15, too, and then either wait for the most recent update in bodhi - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/upda...acious-plugins - or fetch it earlier from koji. For 2.4.x at least MP3'n'stuff is available at rpmfusion.

I thought you had maybe renamed it to confuse me.

This is actually a new form - in the past the problem I've had is that using the interface up or down arrow widgets would move randomly in the playlist instead of previous or next. With 2.5.0-1, nothing happens when the widgets are clicked, no movement at all. This is in the skinned interface.

Ah, a better problem description. I can reproduce that with the evaluation builds of 2.5.0, but not with 2.4.x.

It could be deliberately changed behaviour in 2.5.0. Actually, the next/previous track buttons work just fine during playback. But if playback is stopped, they don't move the current playlist position as 2.4.x does.


Btw, in 2.4.x and older it moves random if the "RAND" button in the skinned interface is enabled.