When I play an mp3 file in mplayer I hear cracks when sound is somehow 'intensive'. It is not present in audacity or when I play wav record (even when the mp3 converted to wav).

I have recently updated my wheeze. Some libs like libasound2 have been updated. I'm not sure which one cause the problem. I'm not sure when exactly it began because I think I made two consecutive updates and in the meantime I was listening to records that seems not concerned by the problem.

I haven't checked previous version of libasound2 and so on because apt-get wants to remove lots of programs during that and I wish to avoid this mass removal. How can I inspect the problem without the necessity to uninstall other software?

You have two choices upgrade or downgrade. You can try the libasound2 in Sid or you can download the .deb from snapshot.debian.org . You can find your last version by searching /var/log/aptitude.

Downgrading would require apt-pinning.

One possibility is that the gain tag on the mp3 is high. You could try running normalize-mp3.

The gain is contained in a tag and does not alter the contents of the data. If your headroom is less then the gain tag value, you may experience clipping during playback.

normalization seems to work, but why do I need to do it in the first place? I used to listen to the same record before and no problem occurred.

moreover, is there an mp3 codec that supports ReplayGain tags? My mplayer seems not to read them.

I guess libmp3 doesn't support it. ( According to the mplayer.users mailing list ) I don't know about libmad.