I experience this problem on different Fedora 7/8/9 installations, on different computers, on different games. Sound plays fine for a few minutes, then I get audio static. After a while, the audio might correct, but it generally requires a game restart. It typically seems to happen with sound effects, more than the games' music.

Any thoughts?

I could be many different things. In dosbox I usually do get some sound distortion if the 'blocksize' is too small. Increasing it will usually stop this in most cases. Also, whatever game it is, make sure to use souldblaster 16 emulation instead of gravis ultrasound, this also helps in some cases. Another thing it might be is your HDD I/O scheduler, but that would cause stuttering when playing videos as well.

You get static noise instead of sound or "noisy" audio (with crackling, etc)?
static noise would mean bug. crackling normally appear when dosbox don't have enough cpu power to process audio - i.e. if cpucycles is set too high(depends on game. With one game you'll get away with 100000 cpucycles, with other you'll get noisy audio much sooner), or if something suddenly starts "stealing" cpu, or if you are using software resize for very large resolutions. This problem frequently appears in protected mode games - if you have dos4gw.exe with the game, then it is almost certainly protected mode. I think There was alternative dos4gw implementation, called dos32a (http://dos32a.sourceforge.net/) I heard that it was faster, so you could try it instead of standard dos4gw.

I boosted the cycles from the default 3000 to 10000, and that helped quite a bit (at least for the particular game I'm currently playing). I'll continue to tweak the sound values also to see if I can get the problem to disappear altogether.

Thanks, guys!