audio playback glitches while using CD drive

[Mac Newbold]

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?

Thanks,
Mac

--
Mac Newbold		MNE - Mac Newbold Enterprises, LLC
mac at macnewbold.com	http://www.macnewbold.com/