Why do my mp3s stop playing when I drag a window in GNOME or in fact do anything 'strenuous' like open a program?

Also, the window leaves a trail behind as it moves. Could this be a graphic driver issue or maybe mp3s using far too much processing power?

What's the hardware, do you have DMA enabled?


Cheers,
Tink

Athlon 1.3, 768MB, ATI Radeon 9550... shouldnt have any problems. Dont know about DMA, where can I find settings like that?

hdparm /dev/hd[a-z]

where [a-z] should be the hdd you're running
linux and/or playing the mp3s off ...


Cheers,
Tink

I have seen this kind of post many times and have not really seen a good answer. Some of the things I remember to try are

Increasing the buffer size can help.

Renice xmms to a higher priority. But to renice it to anything under -1 to -19 requires root access to do. Check the man pages on nice.

Changing the output driver in xmms can help. If using arts try alsa.

Real Techincal Theroy is It has something to do with the IO scheduler under linux. This is a diffucult thing to discuss, but one can find more info on the web about this.

Some people have this problem and others don't. I have not seen any patterns whether it is cpu, ram, or versions of kernel, software, distros. I myself have no problems on any three machines I have.

If one or more items above work or find another answer please post your results here.

Brian1
" Google the Linux way @ http://www.google.com/linux "

OK..

How would I increase the buffer size?

Without xmms playing I get the same window 'trails', so changing process priority wont work.

I changed the output driver one crashed, the other is exactly the same.

One thing I've noted is that when I have system monitor opened with the cpu graph and move the window around the cpu graph shoots up to full. Maybe its not the mp3s slowing the machine, rather linux slowing xmms. Why does moving a window use so much processing power? Is there something wrong with my machine? or is it perfectly normal?

Does it do that in other WMs, e.g. ice, or fluxbox?
Or even KDE? :)


Cheers,
Tink