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

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