I have a linux box on my home lan with mp3s. It serves up files samba style. I have two other boxes and a laptop with access to the samba shares. The boxes play mp3s without a hiccup.
The laptop on a wireless connection, plays songs, but hiccups every ten seconds or sooner. This happens whether I'm next to the wireless router or on the front porch. I can tranfer files wirelessly at a pretty good rate. It's just this hiccup when playing media.

My question: is there a a setting in smb.conf to read ahead bigger chunks of a file I'm getting. This could be considered a wireless issue, but it happens regardless of signal strength. In case is matters I'm using xmms.

u can try another filesystem called the "cifs" for samab share

mount ur samba share as

mount -t cifs '//<share>' <path to be mounted>

this will work if u have this support in ur kernel

regards

thanks, but what are the advantages of using cifs over samba?

this is from kernel source

" CIFS support (advanced network filesystem for Samba, Window and other CIFS compliant servers) (CIFS)

This is the client VFS module for the Common Internet File System
(CIFS) protocol which is the successor to the Server Message Block
(SMB) protocol, the native file sharing mechanism for most early
PC operating systems. The CIFS protocol is fully supported by
file servers such as Windows 2000 (including Windows 2003, NT 4
and Windows XP) as well by Samba (which provides excellent CIFS
server support for Linux and many other operating systems). Currently
you must use the smbfs client filesystem to access older SMB servers
such as Windows 9x and OS/2.

The intent of the cifs module is to provide an advanced
network file system client for mounting to CIFS compliant servers,
including support for dfs (hierarchical name space), secure per-user
session establishment, safe distributed caching (oplock), optional
packet signing, Unicode and other internationalization improvements,
and optional Winbind (nsswitch) integration. You do not need to enable
cifs if running only a (Samba) server. It is possible to enable both
smbfs and cifs (e.g. if you are using CIFS for accessing Windows 2003
and Samba 3 servers, and smbfs for accessing old servers). If you need
to mount to Samba or Windows 2003 servers from this machine, say Y."


regards

thanks again, but from your post and what I was able to Google, the purpose of cifs appears to be about solving compatibility rather than performance issues.

i wanted that u can esplore another option and check for urself

i have used this cifs but since i did not have any problem in smbfs so i had no oppportunity to check the performance

regards