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Running Florence RC2 on a Dell Latitude CPiA laptop, nm256_audio driver, 366MHz Pentium II Celeron CPU. Gnome sounds sound just fine, but xmms playing MP3s come out a bit slow (like waiting for the singer of the national anthem, who's taking her own sweet time, speeding up and slowing down for dramatic effect) and sound choppy. The slow sound problem seems specific to xmms. Using MusicMatch Jukebox, it sounds just fine.
www.musicmatch.com has a MP3 player (free) for Linux (uses wine). mpg123 plays the songs just fine. Only xmms plays them poorly.
If it uses Wine, it's not really for Linux. ;) What output plugin are you using (OSS or ESD, or arts?)
ESD was the one that was failing. Trying now with oss, it seems to work much better, but there's still a bit of random slowness, repeated notes (or perhaps brief skips).
When you get slowdowns/repeats/etc., are you doing anything in particular that might be putting load on the system? Are you running as root or as a normal user?
Running as normal user. No extra load-generating apps (top running, shows 95+% idle). OSS output is really much much better (in fact, almost tolerable).
Which is weird, because mpg123 uses esd by default.
Re-assigning to kernel (per Preston)
If you disable the visual meter stuff entirely does it do any better?
No, with visual meter off, it's still occasionally slow and choppy with esd. I'll try again with qa0309 + kernel 2.4.2-0.1.25.
Tried with qa0309 + kernel 2.4.2-0.1.26, same problem. Occasionally, I can get mpg123 to play slowly too. Keystrokes while in Gnome while mpg123 is playing seems exacerbate the problem, even if the CPU load remains low.
Bleah...I guess since I did the i810 sound driver I now need to do this one as well ;-) I'll look into the driver (it sounds like it is using a horribly small buffer and esd and xmms can't keep it filled reliably, resulting in start/stop/start cycles in the sound output). How does quake or the ossmmap plugin in xmms do?
Matt, I need you to check interrupts on this machine. It almost sounds like the audio driver isn't getting all the interrupts it should (or maybe too many). Let me know how that issue looks on this machine. Also, there is an updated neomagic sound driver in the latest ac kernel I think, you might want to try that (I don't have hardware to test with here currently).