After a week spent closing envelopes and attaching labels, I was finally able to get the audio conversion branch of xine-lib 1.2 to play mp3s.
As libmad decodes the mp3s as 32-bit signed integer samples, the direct output cannot be sent directly to PulseAudio when playing it back (and PulseAudio is the only audio output I converted to the new plugin API), so I had to actually implement at least some basic conversion, in this case from almost every integer format to 32-bit floating point samples (which is the simplest conversion, although it’s CPU consuming.
Previously every mp3 file decoded with libmad was truncated to 16-bit signed integer samples, losing precision, and for what I can see amplifying the volume quite a bit, distorting the signal, but with my new code, there’s no precision loss, and the difference is audible.
You can see the difference in the following screenshot:
If you look at the screenshot you will see the stream info dialog windows of xine-ui: on the left there’s the window for xine-lib 1.1 while on the right there’s the one for xine-lib 1.2 audio_conversion branch. As you can see at the bottom of the window, the first one reports 16-bit for the stream, while the new one returns 32-bit as intended.
I can tell you, the difference is great, and this is just the first step! Hopefully it will be merged in xine-lib-1.2 and then it will be able to play hi-fidelity wave files just fine.
Unfortunately before I can actually merge this branch into main xine-lib-1.2, all the output plugins, the post plugins and most of the audio decoding plugins have to be ported, which is a HUGE amount of work for just one person. I’d also require to use some virtual machines to confirm most of the output plugins work afterward, so it will take me a lot of time alone. If you can handle converting and testing the code, that will certainly be appreciated.
