Vorbis files seem to be skipping randomly (but more intensely when scrolling quickly in firefox, or when firefox is loading). Its quite annoying, and very strange. The problem persists over Rythmbox AND Audacious in the exact same manner. In Sound Properties i tried to set "ALSA" as sound playback in "Music and Movies" and that seemed to do nothing. I tend to listen to music ALL THE TIME while im on so... its very important for me to fix this, thanks for any help you can give.

Edit: I have a high end system AMD Phenom 2 X4 940, Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P motherboard, 8GB RAM, ATI 4870 video. My sound is ATI HDA using ALC883 codec.

The ATI sound is onboard i take it, if it was me I'd add a decent soundcard, it seems the only thing missing from an otherwise great setup. i use a Creative Audigy 2 but I reckon a card with hardware mixing is the preferred solution. maybe the X-FI gamer (not the music one that's crippled), or something from M-Audio's Audiophile line-up, which are well supported on Linux.

Well theres nothing wrong with my onboard sound, it was working perfect in 32bit ubuntu 9.04... its only on 64bit that this problem came up.

bump

Ok I have fixed my issue, sound working excellent again! I came across this guide in the ubuntu documentation. The first step (upgrading ALSA here ) did the trick for me. Then i just changed to the ALSA Output Plugin in Audacious (my fav audio player, but im sure this can be done on the others out there). Even pushed load to 98% (encoding from mp3 to ogg with sound converter) and couldn't get it to skip again for the life of me, my PC is a music powerhouse again! If anyone else has issues like i did, try those guides up there, worked like a charm for me. I'm so happy i don't need to buy a sound card, i knew my card was good!