Sound playback : timing is off !

[Vincent Trouilliez]

That's a very strange thing I experience.

Sometimes, when I listen to MP3 files, it sounds a little strange, male
voices sound like female, female voices sound like 5 year old girl
screaming... It's not that pronounced, but it's bad enough to be
noticeable and stop you from enjoying the music :-/
It's exactly like when you have an old turntable and that the motor
spins a little bit too fast... or some 'DJ' CD players where you can
adjust the speed, or likewise with some old tape players, where you can
fine tune the speed of the tape whilst playing the track.

So basically the timing is a little bit off.

It happens every other day at random, I can't reproduce it. Sometimes it
happens as soon as you log-in, other times it takes several hours before
it starts doing it.

The last time (a couple days ago) it did it, I tried to narrow it down.
It appears to be doing it both with MP3 and OGG files, and regardless of
the software used to playback, and most of them use different libraries
to play back. So the timing problem must come from deeper in the
'stack', some other lower level library that's common to all others.
Don't think it's a hardware problem, never had this problem with other
operating systems on this machine, windows or other Linux distros.

This is what I tried:

Nautilus preview (sox)
Totem (xine-lib)
Rhythmbox (gstreamer08-mad)
XMMS (don't know what lib it uses)


It's very annoying to say the least, because it really takes a reboot to
clear the problem ! :-/ Restarting the apps doesn't help, logging-out
then in neither.


Any idea ? Anyone experienced this ?


Regards,


Vince