I have two systems, let's call them 'home' and 'away'. When I buy a music CD, I rip it onto whichever machine is available, and convert it to flac. I keep copies on both machines by rsyncing, so each machine's music collection is a mirror of the other. Both collections are on encrypted partitions. So far, so good. 'Away' plays the music perfectly, whereas 'home' has some corrupted tracks which have small skips and louder pops and crackles in the playback. The errors are reproducible, in that they occur in the same place each time. It makes no difference which end the original ripping took place, whether at 'home' or 'away'. 'Away' is running Linux Mint with the Gnome desktop. 'Home' is running openSUSE 11.2 with KDE 4.3.4 from the ../KDE4:/STABLE repo. Both machines use mplayer to play the music, though the errors on 'home' occur with amarok also. 'Away' uses pulseaudio, 'home' uses alsa. A faulty file on 'home' is also faulty when transferred to 'away' by scp. Mplayer output on 'away' for faulty copy: mplayer -ao pulse 10\ Rhymes\ of\ Goodbye.flac MPlayer SVN-r29482-4.3.3 (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer Team Playing 10 Rhymes of Goodbye.flac. Cache fill: 0.00% (0 bytes) Audio only file format detected. ========================================================================== Opening audio decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg/libavcodec audio decoders AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 874.0 kbit/61.93% (ratio: 109252->176400) Selected audio codec: [ffflac] afm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg FLAC audio) ========================================================================== [pulse] working around probably broken pause functionality, see http://www.pulseaudio.org/ticket/440 AO: [pulse] 44100Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample) Video: no video Starting playback... [flac @ 0x27dd9c0]FRAME HEADER not here% 84% [flac @ 0x27dd9c0]broken stream, invalid padding [flac @ 0x27dd9c0]invalid frame header [flac @ 0x27dd9c0]decode_frame() failed [flac @ 0x27dd9c0]FRAME HEADER not here% 84% Last message repeated 2 times4.0) 0.4% 49% [flac @ 0x27dd9c0]invalid subframe padding [flac @ 0x27dd9c0]decode_frame() failed [flac @ 0x27dd9c0]FRAME HEADER not here0.4% 49% A: 112.2 (01:52.2) of 184.0 (03:04.0) 0.4% 49% Exiting... (Quit) Mplayer output on 'away' for good copy: mplayer -ao pulse /media/music/artists/Scott\ Walker/1969\ Scott\ 4/10\ Rhymes\ of\ Goodbye.flac MPlayer SVN-r29482-4.3.3 (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer Team Playing /media/music/artists/Scott Walker/1969 Scott 4/10 Rhymes of Goodbye.flac. Cache fill: 18.28% (1916928 bytes) Audio only file format detected. ========================================================================== Opening audio decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg/libavcodec audio decoders AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 874.0 kbit/61.93% (ratio: 109252->176400) Selected audio codec: [ffflac] afm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg FLAC audio) ========================================================================== [pulse] working around probably broken pause functionality, see http://www.pulseaudio.org/ticket/440 AO: [pulse] 44100Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample) Video: no video Starting playback... A: 185.1 (03:05.0) of 184.0 (03:04.0) 0.4% 0% Exiting... (End of file) Both files have the same size: 'Home': -rwxrwxr-x 1 bob music 20154730 2008-06-14 03:23 Scott Walker/1969 Scott 4/10 Rhymes of Goodbye.flac 'Away': -rwxrwxr-x 1 play play 20154730 2008-06-13 22:23 /media/music/artists/Scott Walker/1969 Scott 4/10 Rhymes of Goodbye.flac The drive containing the music collection at 'home' appears to be healthy: fsck -CV /dev/mapper/music [...] /dev/mapper/music: clean, 43894/45874512 files, 117443940/183140352 blocks and: smartctl --all /dev/sdj smartctl 5.39 2009-08-08 r2872~ [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] (openSUSE RPM) Copyright (C) 2002-9 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: SAMSUNG SpinPoint F1 DT series Device Model: SAMSUNG HD753LJ Serial Number: S13UJ1MQ202570 Firmware Version: 1AA01108 User Capacity: 750,156,374,016 bytes Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show] ATA Version is: 8 ATA Standard is: ATA-8-ACS revision 3b Local Time is: Sun Jan 10 08:19:24 2010 GMT SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED [...] SMART Error Log Version: 1 No Errors Logged SMART Self-test log structure revision number 0 Warning: ATA Specification requires self-test log structure revision number = 1 Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error # 1 Short offline Completed without error 00% 8874 - I've run out of ideas in trying to track down the source of these errors, and welcome advice from the list. Thanks, Bob -- Registered Linux User #463880 FSFE Member #1300 GPG-FP: A6C1 457C 6DBA B13E 5524 F703 D12A FB79 926B 994E openSUSE 11.2, Kernel 2.6.31.5-0.1-desktop, KDE 4.3.3 Intel Core2 Quad Q9400 2.66GHz, 4GB DDR RAM, nVidia GeForce 9200GS -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org