audio playback glitches while using CD drive

[Andy Reitz]

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