[Sussex] Curious problem - sound related ???

[Stephen Williams]

John,

Before you start playing a CD or Amarok, open a terminal window and run
top. Leave it where you can see it, then play your CD or run Amarok.
When the skipping starts, see if there are any processes hoggigng CPU
cycles. If there is some sort of file indexing service running in the
background, this can cause problems. It certainly does in Windows.

Steve W.

On Mon, 2006-04-17 at 22:15 +0100, John D. wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
> After some recent system related traumas (due to my meddling with KDE 
> 3.5.2/updates for it/newest nvidia driver), I'm back at the basic mandriva 
> 2006 version with KDE 3.4.2
> 
> It's giving me a problem that starts with audio and progresses to the whole 
> GUI.
> 
> When I was listening to an Audio CD with Kscd earlier it started to "skip", so 
> I tried to eject the disc (via the graphic interface). I noted that if the CD 
> was skipping, the mouse/cursor was unresponsive, the skipping became a 
> complete loss of sound and the GUI was frozen completely.
> 
> The "knee jerk" of ctrl+alt+backspace didn't work either - well it did, 3 or 4 
> minutes later, the disc ejected and system restarted the X server.
> 
> Ok, so I initially thought of knackered CD, but after checking discounted that 
> and decided to rip the disc with Sound Juicer (into FLAC format, as with my 
> other music stuff). This was uneventful.
> 
> I then started playing some music, but with Amorak. The first track or two 
> played OK, then the skipping started, with the same initial GUI freezing 
> symptom leading to the loss of sound/complete GUI freeze.
> 
> I ended up just switching off the speakers and leaving it to see if it would 
> unfreeze itself.
> 
> An hour or two later, I checked back to find that Amorak had crashed without 
> giving an error and the GUI was working fine.
> 
> So, my question is, what or where do I need to start looking at first? Having 
> never experienced symptoms like this before.
> 
> I did look through various logs but nothing really showed up that I could 
> follow enough to try to work out what might be going on - and I couldn't find 
> anything online that might give me any suggestions as to where or what I 
> might need to look at.
> 
> Any ideas or suggestions would be much appreciated as the current 
> configuration has not caused any problems like this before (or other probs 
> for that matter).
> 
> regards
> 
> John D.
> 
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