Re: audio playback glitches while using CD drive

On Tue, 30 May 2006, Mac Newbold wrote:


For quite a while now I've put up with this annoyance, and finally decided
to see if I can find anything about it or how to fix it. Google didn't
turn up anything that I could find, so hopefully someone here might be
able to help or point me in the right direction.

My FreeBSD workstation, currently running 5.5-PRERELEASE though this
happend with various 5.x versions, can't seem to use the
CD-ROM/CD-RW/DVD-RW drive at the same time that it is trying to play an
audio file, like an mp3. I'm set up using the esound daemon, esd, and play
mp3s using mpg123 usually, though other sounds (from gaim, xmms, etc.) are
affected too. Whenever I use the drive, whether using abcde/cdparanoia to
rip or using cdrecord or growisofs to record, I get lots of glitches in my
audio. The glitches come in the form of cracking, crackling, popping, and
other distortion, in addition to slowing down the playback due to the
breaks in it. I get similar crackling and popping while the hard disk
drives are under heavy use, like when rsnapshot/rsync are running backups.
I've confirmed that high CPU usage isn't the cause, because when I don't
use the drives heavily, but am using the CPU a lot, it doesn't occur, like
when lame is encoding an mp3.

Most of the times my CD/DVD drive is in heavy use, my hard disk is also
being heavily used, so maybe that has something to do with it.

I've tried turning up the buffering of the audio in the mp3 player to
extreme levels, such that it probably has buffered the entire song, but it
still doesn't help the problem, not even before the buffer is used up.

Any suggestions or ideas of what might be causing this or what might help
fix it are welcome. Has anyone seen or heard anything like this before?

Hi Mac,

This doesn't sound like a FreeBSD problem to me, but rather a problem with
your sound card being starved for PCI resources when your IDE controller
is being exercised.

To remedy this, you may need to play around a bit. I found a KB article at
creative that seems to cover this topic in a general fashion:

http://dmzweb4.europe.creative.com/SRVS/CGI-BIN/WEBCGI.EXE/,/?St=173,E=0000000000127129525,K=5503,Sxi=1,Kb=ww_english_add,VARSET=ws:http://us.creative.com/,Case=obj(6516)

Good luck,
-Andy Reitz

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