Sound files larger than 1.7MB cannot be played using esound's sample caching

[TheMuso]

When attempting to play a GNOME sound event, with a sound file larger than 1.7MB, a caching error occurrs, since GNOME uses esound's sample caching mechanism to load and then play the sounds when needed.

From further exmination of both PulseAudio and esound code, it seems that esound dynamically allocates memory as needed for each sample, whereas Pulse's esound compatibility module has a fixed maximum sample size of 1024000.

If this was not a design decision, then what are the chances of getting this changed? I don't believe there should be limits to the size of sound event files for users, should they choose to have big/long playing files.

[coling]

The memory is dynamically allocated but the maximum is there to stop filling up the cache with massive files and wasting memory.

For sound events and such you can typically reduce the sample rate to e.g. 22kHz and save half the space without huge sound distortion (they *are* just for events afterall).

If you need to patch it, it's only one line to change as we used to do this in Mandriva before we economised on our sounds samples and reduced the sample rate a bit.

[lennart]

We enforce limits on all resources which can be allocated by the user. Uploading immensly large sound event files should be considered a bug.

In short: this behaviour is a feature not a bug.