It's Not Linux's Fault, But... (Part 2 - Sound)

In this second part of the "It's Not Linux's Fault, But..." series, I am going to talk about my experience with Ubuntu 9.04 when it comes to sound and music.

First of all, let me briefly describe my PC. It's a fair typical PC with on board sound connected to computer speakers, and I have an M-Audio sound card that is connected to my stereo receiver. So the ideal setup for me is to play music through the M-Audio sound card, while the normal PC sound effect goes through the on board. This is basically how I set up sound in Gnome (Gnome is Ubuntu's desktop environment, and I prefer it over the alternative KDE).

I use Foobar as my music player in Windows. So the first thing I did was to look for a music player. After some research, I found that Amarok seemed to be the best music player on Ubuntu. I gave it a try and I liked it. Unfortunately, Amarok is a KDE application, and it ignored the sound device preference I have set in Gnome and played music to my PC speakers. I could not find any sound device preference in Amarok to make Amarok played music to my receiver.

Upon some investigation, I found that Amarok use a backend call Phonon for music playback, and there is no simple way to configure Phonon in Gnome. After some googling, I noticed that the Amarok 2.1 beta has sound device configuration, so I downloaded it (along with zillion KDE related things). The sound device configuration was there in the beta, I can play test sound to my M-Audio sound card, but alas, Amarok still ignores the setting. At this point I gave up on Amarok.

Right now I am resorting to using Rythmbox (Gnome's music player). Rythmbox sounds kind of flat to me, inferior to what I used to from Foobar. Like anything audio, this problem could very well be psychological, but I have nothing to compare Rythmbox's sound to.

My next task is to find a tool to rip CD. I need something more sophisticated than the built-in CD ripper. Specially, I need a program that can read CD multiple times to reduce error, which the built-in CD ripper won't do. Instead of hunting down another application, I found that my Windows CD ripping program Exact Audio Copy runs fine in Wine (Linux's Windows API implementation) so I just used that. Yippe, it worked.

Sound track tagging is another matter. Again I have a specific need. I need the tagging program to be able to import tags from a text file, and applies the tags to the music files. I tried using EasyTag (Linux tagging program), but I am unable to find a way to read text files in EasyTag.

Back to using Windows program again. Mp3Tag (another Windows program) can read tags from text file, it runs in Wine, except the Unicode characters are broken. So for any music track that have non-roman characters in its tag, I have to resort to entering it manually using EasyTag.

Skype works, but again, not right out of the box. In fact, I had to spend a couple of hours to figure out how it works.

I had two issues that prevented me from using Skype. The first issue is by default, Ubuntu assigns my mic input to the jack at the back of my computer. Like most people, I plug my headset into the front jack. The solution is to use alsamixer (runs in terminal) to assign the input source to front mic. Then I had to use the Gnome Sound Recorder application to test the mic.

The second issue is by default, Skype's default sound device setting does not work for me. In Skype's menu, there are three sound device assignments (Sound In, Sound Out and Ringing). Each can be assigned to one of the available 14 sound devices.

The solution was to first assign Sound Out and Ringing to pulse (Gnome's sound engine), then use trial and error to find out which sound device works for Sound in.

By the way, Skype also tend to mess up the mixer setting, causing the mic input level to be too low. There is a setting to turn this off when you assign sound devices in Skype.

I need to make calls using Skype. If Skype does not work, I simple am not going to use Ubuntu on my desktop.

(to be continue...)