Re: [pygame] pygame.mixer failure on Mac OS X

[Bob the Hamster <Bob-pygame-users@HamsterRepublic.com>]

On Fri, Jul 30, 2004 at 02:55:50PM -0400, Bob Ippolito wrote:
> 
> On Jul 30, 2004, at 2:48 PM, Bob Ippolito wrote:
> 
> > On Jul 30, 2004, at 2:39 PM, Bob the Hamster wrote:
> >
> >> Hey,  y'all. Anybody else using PyGame on Mac OS X? I installed it 
> >> using
> >> the pre-built packages from http://undefined.org/python/pimp/ and it 
> >> was
> >> working perfectly until I started to plaay around with pygame.mixer
> >>
> >> I added .ogg music and sound effects to my game, and they worked fine 
> >> on
> >> both my GNU/Linux boxes, and on both Windows98 and WindowsXP boxes I
> >> tested with, but on my Mac OS X box, it hangs on
> >> pygame.mixer.Sound(filename) and the processor usage spikes. I have to
> >> force-quit the python interpreter.
> >>
> >> I strongly suspect that this is because the ogg vorbis libraries are
> >> completely missing in the Mac OS X prebuilt packages. The description
> >> for the "sdl_pygame_deps 1.2.6" package says: "SDL, SDL_image,
> >> SDL_mixer, SDL_ttf, smpeg for pygame" but it says nothing about ogg
> >> vorbis.
> >>
> >> So my questions:
> >>
> >> (1) Does anybody know how to get this fixed? Or worked-around?
> >
> > Compile it yourself.  I thought it had ogg support, but I don't really 
> > have time to build another right now.
> >
> >> (2) Does anybody know how to detect that the program is running on Mac
> >> OS X so I can disable sound support until I figure out (1)? Python's
> >> os.name == 'posix' on Mac OS X, same as on GNU/Linux, so I can'tt use
> >> that.
> >
> > sys.platform == 'darwin' -- but it's not the platform's fault, it's 
> > the particular package you are using.  You are better off trying to 
> > play the sound file, and if it fails, just don't try and play any more 
> > sound files.  Python has exceptions for a reason.
> 
> Oh sorry, I didn't read your whole message.  Actually, I'm not sure 
> your guess is correct, you should really break into the process and get 
> a backtrace with GDB, get a sample from Activity Monitor, use Shark, or 
> something like that to see what it's doing when the CPU is thrashing.  
> Another thing you could do is post a minimal script and ogg file that 
> breaks and I may have a chance to try and reproduce/fix it myself.

Aha! Interesting. When I reduced the problem to an ultra-simplified 
test-case, (which you can find at 
http://gilgamesh.dnsalias.org:8080/~james/mac-ogg-lock.tar.bz2 ) I got 
different behavior. pygame.mixer.Sound(filename) would cause the CPU to 
spike to 100% usage for about 10-12 seconds, and then move on. If I 
tried playing the sound afterwards, there would be no sound.

I tried running my game again, this time waiting patiently. After about 
3 minutes of CPU-going-crazy while loading all my sound effects it moved 
on, and started the game as normal. So it is not hanging, as I 
originally reported, it is just failing remarkably slowly :)

---
Bob the Hamster