Play freeze

Play freeze

[Tarim]

  I use sox under Lubuntu 14.04 - it's all been working fine until today
when play appears to freeze after printing the file information but
before playing any sound.

- It fails with both .wav's and .mp3's.

- top shows that play is using 99%-100% of the CPU.

- The play process doesn't respond to ctrl-C or kill; it can only be
killed with kill -9.

- mplayer and other sound outputs still work fine.

- sox inputfile outputfile still works fine.

- I recently installed pulseaudio though I'm pretty sure it's worked since
I did that so this may be a red herring.

- I tried disabling pulseaudio and/or running with export AUDIODRIVER=alsa
anyway but this didn't help.

- I tried reinstalling sox, just in case, but this didn't help either.

- I installed some extra festival voices today but I think I'm clutching
at straws now (and anyway, uninstalling them didn't help).

  Anyone got any ideas what it might be or how to investigate further?

  Cheers,
    Tarim



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Re: Play freeze

[Tarim]

  Curiouser and curiouser!

play xx.wav < /dev/null
  works fine.

  and, when I boot with the previous kernel, Ubuntu 3.13.0-63-generic:
play xx.wav
  works fine!


  I'm now thinking that this is actually a bug in the latest Ubuntu kernel
3.13.0-65.105-generic where select's FD_ISSET returns true even when
there is no data to read!

  Sox checks to see if there is a 'v' or 'V' from the keyboard to control
the volume - FD_ISSET returns true and getchar() returns -1.  Can't
quite see why sox checks kbhit() in a while loop rather than with an if,
but perhaps I should take that up on the developers list.

  Finding it hard to believe this bug could slip through into the kernel -
but I've reported it to the Ubuntu kernel group - so we'll see if they
tell me it's just me going mad.

  Cheers,
    Tarim



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Re: Play freeze

[Tarim]

  Quick note to say that Linux 3.13.0-66-generic kernel is now available
(at least in Ubuntu 14.04) and "play" is back to working in the usual
way - so it was just the one kernel with the problem.

  (Still haven't built the latest sox from source - but that's a
completely different problem that I hope to find time to look at next
month.)

  Cheers,
    Tarim



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