I just installed the latest version of Ubuntu (NOT Ubuntu Studio). There is hellacious skipping during music playback using Totem and Audacity. The skipping gets worse when I scroll web pages. I tried launching these programs using nice with a priority of -20, no joy. Windows XP and Vista play back the very same file as smooth as silk. My computer has a 2 GHz Pentuim 4 with 2 GB of RAM.

1. Does anyone have a workaround/solution?

2. What good is a "real-time" Linux kernel if this is the result?

3. Does anyone expect Linux to be a suitable platform for audio with this kind of nonsense going on?

Thanks in advance.

I found that you can upgrade a vanilla installation of Ubuntu to Ubuntu Studio. Did that, skipping now be gone. Wonder what kind of magic they implemented to do that? Should be standard on all distros IMO, unless someone knows they definitely won't be doing audio or video in real time. Audio recording DEFINITELY requires real-time, learned that a long time ago.