Xmms FreeBSD and buzzing or skipping sound [SOLVED] - sorta

[Derek]

Nikolas Britton wrote:
> #man sound
Ouch.  Hurts to be on the receiving end of one of these.  Don't get me
wrong, I totally appreciate it.  Just wish I woulda went that avenue first.

> My /boot/loader.conf:
> hw.snd.targetirqrate=48
> hint.pcm.0.buffersize="8192"

Well after tinkering for a few hours with different combinations of
targetirqrate, and buffersize, it turns out I didn't need to modify
targetirqrate at all, and I needed to set buffersize to 64k.

My working /boot/loader.conf looks like this (for sound stuff):

sound_load="YES"
snd_emu10k1_load="YES"
hint.pcm.0.buffersize="65536"

This seems to eliminate the problem of the sound skipping.

I used 'unzip jdk-1_5_0-src-scsl.zip' to produce the skipping/jitter
effect reliably.  I also re-tarred the extracted files using 'tar zcvf 
new.tar.gz *', and when I extracted using 'tar zxvf new.tar.gz' I had 
the same difficulties.

.... Having said all that ....

I think that there is something bigger at work here though, because when
I'm running that command, I've noticed it's not just the sound that is
choppy, but it seems interactivity (in X) goes down all together, even 
with just the default loader.conf.  The mouse skips, the frame rate on 
xmms' graphical eq goes down, moving windows around is extremely laggy. 
Interactivity comes in waves during the unzip process.

You would think with the 4.4BSD scheduler, and a SMP system, the machine
would still be fairly interactive.  I've got no fancy tweaks to the 
kernel just plain ol' KERNCONF=SMP...

I wrote a script that created a bunch of random-sized, random-data 
files, and tried un-tarring them, but it didn't seem to exercise the 
same gears that un-(tarr|zipp)ing jdk does (lots of highly compressable 
small files in a complex directory structure).  I would be interested if 
others wanted to share their results, although I think a new thread name 
is in order.

Thanks for everyone's time,
Derek