MavEtJu's Distorted View of the World

Sound hickups during disk access

Posted on 2004-03-23 13:52:12, modified on 2006-01-09 16:29:21
Tags: Computers, FreeBSD

Recently I changed two things on my computer. 1. I upgraded to FreeBSD 5.2.1 and 2. I installed a bigger harddisk.

When using the soundcard (playing MP3s, listening to the radio, watching movies), the sound got bargled (hickupped, prrrrrtzed, whatever you call it) for a split second, after which it continued as normal.

Annoying, specially if you are singing along. Guido van Rooij (former collegue, fellow FreeBSD user etc) told me to change the buffersize on the sound card to 16Kb:

[~] edwin@k7>sysctl hw.snd.pcm0.buffersize
hw.snd.pcm0.buffersize: 16384

To do this, requires a change in /boot/device.hints:

[~] edwin@k7>grep pcm /boot/device.hints
hint.pcm.0.buffersize=16384

and a reboot. Since this change my MP3s play smoothly.

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Comments:
From: withheld@witheld.com
URL:
Posted on: 2004-07-14 09:10:45
CommentThank god for your blog.... trying to get mp3s working on my ME6000 has driven me mad these last few days.

I had exactly the same problem, and so your hint worked a treat.

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From: ohwell@nevermind.com
URL:
Posted on: 2004-07-16 09:06:55
CommentOh well, I spoke to soon. Though everything worked fine after the reset with the new value, the exact same problem occured with my system after 2 days of operation... reboot and its ok again - no idea why it skips every 30 seconds...
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