Media sounds on old laptop better in Windows then Kubuntu
 

Hi,

I have an pretty old machine (P3, 450 MHz, 377MB) installed as dual-boot WinXp/Kubuntu 7.04.

Now when I play any media (sound-)stream (f.i. http://mp3.streampower.be/stubru-high or any other media) it sounds a lot better in windows then in linux. The player I use (Windows media player, winamp, xmms, mplayer, vlc) does not make a difference. On linux the sound is shocking (as in not smooth) while in windows the sound is near perfect.

It looks like that on linux the processor speed is simply not enough because the proc-loads goes up to nearly 100%.

Is this a known problem in linux?
Are there any solutions (besides buyig a new machine)?

Cheers, Ronald

I think stubru is to blame more than your old laptop. I just gave it a try myself and found it impossible to get more than a few seconds of sound - that is on a Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM.

I got a warning though: "works on Windows and MAC; other operations systems not guaranteed". That says it all I'm afraid.

I did a backtrace to find out what went wrong and was presented with a plethora of error messages - if that's happening to you as well, no wonder it's overloading your CPU. I'm amazed you get any sound at all.