Sound Problems

[Jason Clinton]

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Adam Davis wrote:
| Evenin'.
|
| I'm currently running FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE.
|
| I've got XFree86 4 installed, and have been using XMMS to play MP3s.  Back
| when I was with 4.4-RELEASE (and XFree86-3.3), I didn't have any
| problems.  However, since the upgrade, I get scratchy/distorted sounds
| from XMMS whenever I do anything like re-locate a window or use the scroll
| on an xterm window.
|
| Anybody got ideas on why, and how I might fix it (aside from returning to
| FreeBSD 4.4 ;)?
|

The reason is that your PCI bus is consuming all of the bandwidth for the data
stream to your sound card. If you're using OSS you might consider implementing
either ARTS or E-Sound Daemon which have control panels to allow you configure
the quantity of data that is sent with each burst of data accross the PCI bus.
(Bigger packets should equal less fragmentation.) I've also found that ALSA is
picky about certain audio cards and is the default install option for a number
of distros. If you can, switch to the OSS.

Also, ensure that you have properly accelerated your XServer by using the
correct video driver. If you're in frame buffer mode, I would almost best that
is the cause.

If it's a really old system, I would also suspect that large quantities of
network traffic cause the 'skipping' sound as well.

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