XMMS Skips -- Do I need more memory?

[Syrinx]

I recently installed Ubuntu 7.04 (feisty fawn) on a P4, 2.4 GHz machine. The computer has a half gig of memory. Is that enough?

I haven't had major problems so far, except that when I use XMMS to play mp3 files, the music will skip a half second or so about every minute or two. Would having too little memory cause this?

My previous configuration was a woeful AMD K6-2 450 MHz with 128 MB of memory (I bought it in 1999, and it served me well), but it played my mp3's flawlessly. I was using the leaner IceWM instead of GNOME on it.

The only other difference that I can think of was that the P4 has onboard video and audio. Would it be better to use my old Soundblaster card for audio? My current motherboard is using the RealTek ALC655 chipset.

Also, would it be better for video to use my old ATI Rage IIC video card rather than the onboard P4M800CE? I don't think my videos look as good on the new machine, but I can't be certain without seeing them side-by-side. The onboard video has 32MB of memory as opposed to the old card's 8MB, so I thought that would be better, but maybe not.

People actually sometimes pay me money to write computer programs, but I admit I'm terribly ignorant where it comes to hardware. Someone please help me.

:)

[RoyGBiv]

1. Weird ...

With 512, you shouldn't have the kind of performance hit you seem to be having, but there are a couple of issues to consider.

The onboard sound and video are most likely using system memory. In the specs for the mobo, it likely says something about "shared" memory, meaning it shares with the system, although no real "sharing" takes place since the amount of memory the onboard stuff uses tends to be locked for that use at boot. But, it's not taking enough that it should cause skipping while playing an mp3. You'd have to have enough memory chewed up that the swap partition is being used almost continuously for that to take place, and I doubt that is happening.

Your sound may be misconfigured, which is easy to do with those onboard sound chips. The one you're using is kind of a standard, but it standardly sucks, imo.

You could do a test and not start X (or shut it down), then play an mp3 using a command line and see if the skipping still takes places. This would narrow it down a bit, since without X started, most of what is consuming your memory is released.

I know this isn't really helpful ... just rambling while trying to work out what it might be. Your system specs are more than enough to play simple mp3s.

[Syrinx]

3. thanks for the suggestions

I just noticed that my system memory is being reported as 482MB instead of 512MB, so I guess 30MB gets swiped for video.

My music is playing fine tonight, using Rhythmbox instead of XMMS. At first glance I'm not crazy about the interface to this program, though it's pretty neat the way it grabs the album covers off the net and displays them. Maybe Ubuntu has a buggy version of xmms, and I should compile from source, but the reason I chose Ubuntu in the first place was to escape dependency hell. Ain't computers fun? ;)

Heck, I already had to build mplayer form source. No matter what I did I couldn't get Ubuntu's mplayer to find and load certain codecs. Compiled from source and everything worked perfectly.

I think tomorrow I will put in my old video card and sound card and see if I get better results with those. I think the OpenChrome driver doesn't play well with KDE/QT programs. Whenever I try to run Krusader or KPovModeler, there is a total system freeze, and I can't even get out of X with a three-fingered salute. The system reset button won't even work. That didn't happen when I was using the basic VESA driver.

Thanks as always for the help!

[FormerDittoHead]

2. I would say something is interrupting the process...

Something isn't playing "nice", and taking over the needed CPU.

I tried Kubuntu, and, in finding out their distro lags in their updates to Ubuntu, there was some process which was sucking up my CPU (I used "top"). Sorry, I forgot what this was, but I needed to disable something in an /etc/*.conf file...

My point is that I think you have PLENTY of hardware there, but something intensive is running...

[Syrinx]

4. thanks!

top doesn't reveal any culprits. As I commented to Roy, maybe Ubuntu's xmms is buggy. I know their mplayer is.

Thanks for the suggestion!