i upgraded my cpu yesterday or the day before, i can't
remember which, and i noticed that mpg123 would
skip. mplayer would play. that definately had me thinking
it was a mpg123 issue. i tried a bunch of different
versions with different compile options. same crap
booted different kernels, different versions of linux.
all the same. windows 2000 skipped on all sounds.
i do so much stuff to my computer, it's had to track down
what all i did. i had upgraded the bios, and changed
bios settings. it really sounded like a dma conflict, with
the skipping playing the same sound over and over.
then mplayer started skipping too. i moved all my cards
to make them have different settings, and it started
working. i put everything back the way it was, so i
could figure out what exactly was causing the problem.
it still worked. i set every bios setting and software
option back the way it was. still worked. i guess the
card was a little loose from working on the machine.
i wish it had just quit working altogether. it would have
saved me a few hours.

ive spent many hours in the past few days trying
to change the cdrtools code where it can't turn
the burn-free off. i'm having a horrible time with it.
the old software i like to use isn't detecting burn-free,
and it keeps setting the option, burnproof=off in it's
settings. i can't figure out exactly how in the code to do
it. i had alread set the grace period down to 3 seconds.
i've been doing that for years. thats now in cdrecord.h
i can't understand the mmc_drv.c code well enough
to change the setting not to turn burnproof off or to
always set it to on. sometimes it keeps doing crazy
stuff like, if it's on, it turns it off, and if it's off, it turns it on.
i know how to do it from the command line, but i want
to be able to change settings in my software i use w/o
it changing back to burnproof =off. aarrrrgggg.