I've had this problem before, and managed to escape it through upgrading ALSA and friends. But now it's back again, on a machine that's caused me nothing but grief so far.
Initially I was trying to use an onboard SB Audigy 24bit with ALSA. Sadly recording is not supported. Then I tried OSS, but despite claiming support for recording, it doesn't work. So I've bought a Terratec USB 5.1 MkII card (all PCI slots are used by capture cards) which uses the generic snd-usb-audio driver. Using ALSA rat leaves me shafted, as it doesn't even start up with a failed assertion. I might poke at this later although I suspect this is a painful road. Using OSS rat with ALSA (using OSS emulation) works, and recording works perfectly. Playback however is shoddy, with it sounding warbled. As far as I can gather it's trying to repair the audio (as it sound different with different repair schemes) but there's no packet loss. If I add redundancy to the stream, the audio sounds fine, as does it if I drop to 8kHz. Neither of these are a solution though. Anyone got any suggestions as to how to fix this? jh -- "Come friendly bombs, and fall on Slough! It isn't fit for humans now, There isn't grass to graze a cow. Swarm over, Death." -- Sir John Betjeman
