[LAU] a NEW question about pitch and speed

[Kevin Cosgrove]

On 31 May 2010 at 19:48, Igor Brkic <igor at hyperglitch.com> wrote:

> On 31.05.2010 19:16, Kevin Cosgrove wrote:
> >
> > This morning when I turned on my computer it started playing
> > stuff on Pandora, but more slowly and at a lower pitch than
> > normal.  I wondered if this was just a problem with Pandora,
> > so I checked my own song files with Amarok.  Again, that
> > music plays more slowly and at a lower pitch than I'd expect.
> > 1-2 days ago this very same computer played at the right
> > pitch and speed.
> >
> > What could have gone wrong?  The built-in (only) sound
> > card's clock is now running more slowly?  Some system wide
> > configuration changed for the sound system, and it now slows
> > things down?
> >
> > If it's a configuration thing, then I didn't intend to
> > do that, nor did I even touch the configuration.  This
> > computer runs PulseAudio on Mandriva 2009.1.  The driver is
> > snd_intel8x0.
> >
> > Any ideas folks?
>
>
> I had the same problem sometimes on my last computer. It had
> Gentoo on it and onboard soundcard. Sometimes it just did
> that (usually in the middle of some high demanding task, like
> compilation). Solution was sometimes to just restart alsa,
> but that didn't work more times that it did. Restarting whole
> system usually helped.
>
> Unfortunately, I never found out what caused the problem so
> this is not very helpful (I am not using that machine any more,
> but now it runs just fine with Linux Mint on it).

Your reply IS helpful.  Now I know that someone else had the
issue.  While away from email for a bit, I wondered if maybe
the temperature of my system was high enough to cause a clock
rate to lower.  I can imagine that a badly designed system might
even allow a lower CPU speed to alter the audio clock rate too.
Your comment about the sound speed/pitch changing under high
load would be consistent with this theory, in that high load can
increase the system's internal temperature.

Thanks....
--
Kevin