[techtalk] MP3's and my laptop

[Jamie Walker]

Terri Oda wrote:

> My computer is a laptop (a Eurocom 3100c, specifically, with a mobile
> celeron under the hood) using a maestro sound card.  It plays CDs
> beautifully and seems to have no problem with wav files or anything
> else... until I come to mp3's.  Winamp skips, as did the other player I
> tried in windows, as do mpg123 and xmms under linux... however, windows
> media player works beautifully.

Have you tried increasing the buffer sizes? In mpg123 you can do this
with the -b option (according to the command-line help this is specified
in kilobytes) or in XMMS by going to the Options -> Preferences from the
menu, then Audio I/O Plugins and clicking the Configure button for the
OSS Driver (assuming you're outputting using that). From the buffering
tab you can try raising the buffer by several seconds and seeing if this
makes a difference.

Also, if your onboard sound is on the ISA bus then PCI video cards can
steal bus cycles which can make sound skip, but I imagine a notebook
would probably have PCI sound. This also wouldn't explain why .wav files
play okay.

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