[plug] Media player advice

[Brad Campbell]

G'day all,

I have a peculiar issue I can't find a reasonable solution to. My 
desktop is an iMac. This has a combined headphone/TOSLINK output, so I 
have it plugged into my home theater receiver with a long TOSLINK cable.

The problem is related to the receiver. Any interruption to the PCM 
stream, or a change of sampling frequency causes a pop or thump. And 
every media player I've tried thus far has shut the device between songs.

I can "work around" the problem by getting mplayer to decode a directory 
of music to stdout (resampling where required to a standard bitrate) and 
then piping that into another instance of mplayer (or sox) to play the 
music. That way I get an uninterrupted stream of music and no pops. Not 
very user friendly though.

I've tried mplayer, vlc, banshee & gtkpod thus far. I run an old 
Mint-Debian edition, so it's a bit old and clunky.

I've even had serious thought about running itunes in a Windows VM if 
it'll solve the problem.

Is this something _anyone_ has ever bumped up against?

Years ago I wrote some DJ software. That decoded using mpg123 (with some 
patches for speed control, queuing and beat-mixing) and that piped 
through a custom written output buffer to solve exactly this issue with 
some old PCI sound cards. That was back in about 98 and I don't really 
want to go back to writing my own software just to play music without pops.

Regards,
Brad