gnome-cd plays intermitent sounds

[Petri Pennanen]

On Thu, 2004-11-04 at 11:22 -0600, Carlos Escutia Chávez wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I've just reinstalled ubuntu hoping to solve a problem with gnome-cd,
> with no success: when I try to play a disc, it plays, but with sound
> skips every second ( ! ). I first suspected a malfunctioning cdrom
> unit, but it plays well in XP. Then I thought I had screwed my
> installation by installing some non-ubuntu packages, so I did the
> reinstall. No luck :(. I even tried stopping the famd daemon, just in
> case it was monitoring the disc every second (the hd monitoring led
> keeps blinking).

This problem only occurs with audio CD:s? No problems playing sound
files from the hard drive?

> Strangely, it had happened before, when I had Debian + xfce. I have
> had Red Hat 9, Fedora 2 & Gentoo installed before in this laptop,
> without any (gnome-cd) problem.
>
> Hope someone points me in the right direction

Not sure it is the right direction, but I'm thinking it might be a DMA
issue. Check this by running

	hdparm /dev/hdc

If "using dma = 0 (off)" you can try setting it on:

	sudo hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc

Does it work now? 

If not the root to your problem might be an IRQ conflict. I don't know
how to debug that, but others will.

- Petri