[linux-audio-user] audio drop using alsaplayer with jack

[Cournapeau David]

Hi there,

    I am trying to have a not too bad audio experience on my laptop, 
which has a i8x0 audio chipset (snip). I have a 2.6.6-rc2  kernel,  
preempt enable, without any patches, but with the Jack o Quinn realtime 
module. I happened to use 3 different players on my former PC: rythmbox, 
alsaplayer and xmms. But on my laptop, whenever I am doing cpu-intensive 
or heavy disk related operations, there are big audio drops which are 
quite annoying. Here is my configuration:
    - rhythmbox: I don't do anything special to gstreamer, I think it 
uses oss emulation. Totally unusable on my laptop :( drops, really bad 
sound, gstreamer seems to have some nasty bugs. When I am doing 
somehting like 'gst-launch sinesrc ! osssink', it doesn't sound like a 
sine at all !
    - xmms: with alsa plugin, it works, but it 'stops' working for a few 
seconds when I am doing CPU and/or disk intensive operations ( example: 
tar -xjf kernel-sources ). I've never managed to make the jack plugin work.
    - alsaplayer with jack output plugin, jack launched with the -R 
option. Jack doesn't complain about xruns, but still, alsaplayer still 
stops, like xmms under the same conditions (the time counter stops for 
around a second).

    I was so desperate that I thought about a hardware problem in my 
audio chipset, but it works perfectly on windows (re snip).

    What should I do to avoid these really annoying audio drops under 
linux ?

    Thank you,

    David