On 18 May 2002, at 14:55, Nicholas Bacetti wrote:

> On my office's IBM 300PL - PII/Win 98, I'm having the following
> problem.  When I play any audio (CD, internet radio, or MPEG) the
> playback isn't smooth, the sound hesistates every second or so.
> It kind of sounds like it's having a chronic case of hicups.  It
> doesn't matter which speaker I use (internal or external) or which
> software (RealPlayer or Media Player).  I've had the machine for 2
> years and this was never a problem, until 3 months ago.  The IT
> folks re-imaged this machine about a month ago, for an unrelated
> problem, but the re-image didn't fix the audio problem.  What
> might be the problem?  Thanks.

  The problem probably isn't between the sound card and the speakers
(which is why changing speakers doesn't help), but in *getting* the
data to the sound card in a timely fashion.  My first thought was
that I see this sort of thing when I play back from a shared drive
mounted over the network, rather than from a local drive, and that
could apply to Internet radio as well as MPEG files.

  But when you say "CD", I'm assuming you probably mean a CD in the
local machine, so network performance shouldn't come into it.
  So the other possiblity -- the bane of multimedia, often -- is that
something running on the local machine is interfering with the
playback, either directly by using too much of the CPU, or indirectly
by using too much of the memory so that the audio keeps getting
swapped out to disk.

  I can't guess from your description above what application might be
"the problem".
  However, your reference to "the IT folks" suggests that this
machine has been provided for specific purposes, and if those
purposes now conflict with your ability to listen to audio on it, you
may not receive much sympathy from them.

David Gillett

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