Sound skipping?

[exploder]

My sound randomly skips or pulses. It's kind of hard to describe but the problem happens at random and when it occurs only rebooting will make it stop. I have a Foxconn ATI motherboard with HDA Soundblaster sound, the mixer shows HDA ATI SB and HDA NVidea... HDA ATI has all the controls displayed, HDA NVidea only displays PCM. I am running the 2.6.38-6 bfs pae kernel. I am wondering if anyone else has had this problem and found a solution or work around for it? Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated. 

[zerocool]

does it do this playing local files or internet streams or all of the above?

My first guess is you're running short of ram...

just a guess

[menotu]

Additionally, which music app are you using? If it's Amarok there was a blog about "gapless" playback, but not sure if this is what is happening to you?

http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,91511.0.html

[exploder]

Sometimes the problem occurs right on startup but today it happened playing a flash video. It doesn't seem to be any certain task but sound in general. I have 4 GB of RAM and the memory use is very good for KDE so I don't think memory is a problem. Usually the sound will start skipping with the startup sound and I will re-boot and it will be fine. It's a really odd issue....

Edit: I made a remastered iso from another machine and installed on the machine that is having the problem. Could there possibly be something left over from the other machines configuration causing the problem? I remastered the KDE mini edition in Virtualbox and did both installs originally. I am not sure if this would effect anything but I figured I would try and give complete information.

[zerocool]

Sometimes the problem occurs right on startup

Very Strange... 

It'd be nice if you had a spare sound card around
in a shoebox to pop in and see if it goes away.

[exploder]

I don't have any sound cards to try, both my computers have on-board sound. The Foxconn motherboard in this computer has always been a pain. I had to flash the BIOS on this thing 3 times to get it to stop destroying hard drives! This thing ruined 3 brand new hard drives, about 5 times of booting up and the drive would be fried! The hard drive that's in the computer now has lasted a year and a half so that issue is finally behind me. This board has to be one of the ones Foxconn purposely built as a Windows only board, remember all the news about that?

[zerocool]

I had to flash the BIOS on this thing 3 times to get it to stop destroying hard drives! This thing ruined 3 brand new hard drives, about 5 times of booting up and the drive would be fried! The hard drive that's in the computer now has lasted a year and a half so that issue is finally behind me. This board has to be one of the ones Foxconn purposely built as a Windows only board, remember all the news about that?

Well in that case we could see this as an opportunity to
turn that  upside-down 

http://www.linpc.us/

 

[exploder]

Yeah, wish I could afford a new machine but I am off work, had to have reconstructive surgery on my right foot. I have never had the sound issue with any other distribution, so I think this is just a configuration issue of some kind. I plan on staying with PCLinuxOS and would just like to figure this out.

[exploder]

I tried running alsaconf to see if that helps, it detected the ATI SB sound and configured the master volume correctly. I guess I will just have to boot it up for a while and see if the problem is gone.

Edit: Rebooted the system 3 times and the sound problem is still present.... Anyone have any ideas?

Edit 2: I got to thinking, I had this problem on this computer once before and using a much older pae kernel solved the problem but with the newer xserver-org packages I would like to be able to stay with a more current kernel. I have tried the 2.6.38 and 2.6.37 kernels and still have the sound issue. Still at a loss on how to get this fixed.

[tom43]

          Good Day, It might be the kernel. I'm running the exact same kernel with 8GB of RAM and the ATi 880G Chipset. I have noticed a very slight random skip as well playing a CD. I've experimented with both PATA & SATA Optical Drives. Earlier today Tex posted that he sent "Kernel 2.6.38.7" to the repo. I would try it first. That all said, I don't know which Music Player you're using, but I have tried three different ones with no change. Also, I'm using a just purchased new sound card with the same results. I don't think it's the sound chip, although I get the poorest on-board sound results when I'm running a Foxconn ATi 760G Chipset. FYI, the quality of on-board sound is based on the quality of the Mobo Wiring, which Foxconn does a very poor job of. Also, FYI, over the past few day's, I've been playing with a few different flavors of PCLinuxOS. Interestingly , with my ATi MSI 880G Mobo, the "GNOME ZEN" is by far the better performing flavor. In summation, as soon as the new kernel hits the repo, try it.

[exploder]

tom43, thanks for the reply. Our hardware is pretty similar and I have tried everything I can think of to fix this. My only option right now is to try the new kernel when it comes into the repos.