I find that when playing mp3's the sound gets jumpy when computer doing other things (e.g. opening new web page)

how can I rectify this?

I'm using the default Suse 8.2 personal installation w/ athlon 2400xp, 256MB ram

Thanks

This sounds like it may simply be a case of too much competition for a fixed amount of system resources. By having a lot of apps open simultaneously, it's possible the amount of resources devoted to your audio app may be degraded to the point where the sound skips, but I think you have several options to try. My first suggestion would be to just try closing out some of those other apps that you aren't currently using, to free up system memory. (Another option would be to consider adding more memory, if your budget can support it.) Secondly, are the mp3's stored on your hard drive or have you burned them to a CD? If they're being played from a directory on your HD, and you have a lot of disk activity going on from all those other open apps, then you might just be running into a basic I/O issue, meaning that the heads might be traveling all over your drive and your system just can't read in data fast enough to make the playback smooth. Perhaps if you burned the mp3's to a CD, then played them from the CD, the jumpiness might go away. -- J.W.

It does seem to be competition for fixed amount of system resources although I'm not using that much (internet, email, im, kde) and 256MB should be enough??

I did install 1GB of memory but computer kept crashing for whatever reason, so took it out (later found that suse 8.2 doesn't support 1GB - will try again when suse 9.0 arrives)

The MP3 is stored on the hard drive. I'll try again with it on cd.

This isn't a problem I have with my windows laptop which probably has a greater system load(1.6Ghz, 256mb Toshiba 9100). (although numerous other reasons to be disgruntled with windows which I won;t go into here)

Thanks for your help. It would be very nice to get this machine working so I can watch dvd's...

If all you're doing is to surf the net, send Email and IM, then 256 should be adequate. Doubling up to 512 might help, but as I indicated previously it's looking like it might be more likely that the files are stored in such a way that your heads have to do a lot of work to read in the data. If the app you're using for the mp3 playback permits you to adjust the size of the read-ahead buffer, then that would be the next thing to try. -- J.W.