Basically, when a lot of stuff is happening on the screen, anything played through ESD gets awfully distorted. realplayer doesn't have this problem, but mpg123 does, as does xmms. (if realplayer is shunted through ESD, then it experiences the same distortion.) On a related note, it doesn't seem possible to make mpg123 NOT use esd, which is a real pain. Also, further muddying the picture, xmms shows the same distortion even when not using ESD. Not sure why this is.
Further details: the problem it turns out DOES occur with RealPlayer, but only when playing MP3s, not when streaming over the net. So this sounds like it's not an ESound problem per-se, but more generally a problem with the interaction between X and the sound card. I know it's X because other kinds of CPU and disk activity (launching mozilla, compiling, running large compute jobs) don't disrupt the sound. My soundcard is a Neomagic 256AV (rev 2). It's configured in soundcfg as an OPL3 SAx card. I tried the Neomagic 256AV option directly, but it didn't work. (Gateway calls this a Neomagic NMA2 and in reviews as the Neomagic MagicWave A2). Also, the sound behavior seems to be worse with RedHat 7.0 than it was with Redhat 6.2.
Extra note: my soundcard is configured as an OPL3 SAx card. THis is how I configured it in RH6.2 and RH6.1, with no problems. There is an entry for the Neomagic card itself, but it doesn't get set up correctly by sndconfig. Here's the error message it produces The following error occurred running the modprobe program: /lib/modules/2.2.16-22/misc/nm256.o: init_module: Device or resource busy /lib/modules/2.2.16-22/misc/nm256.o: insmod /lib/modules/2.2.16-22/misc/nm256.o failed /lib/modules/2.2.16-22/misc/nm256.o: insmod sound-slot-0 failed
Thanks for the bug report. However, Red Hat no longer maintains this version of the product. Please upgrade to the latest version and open a new bug if the problem persists. The Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) maintains some older releases, and if you believe this bug is interesting to them, please report the problem in the bug tracker at: http://bugzilla.fedora.us/