Even if there's nothing else sending stuff to my soundcard?
The bottleneck doesn't need to be the soundcard, but the cpu. The cpu also calculate sound. If the cpu is hogged in some way, then soundplayback will suffer.
Either way, I supposeyou could just use pure jack. There's a gst-plugins-jack in extra repo, (0.8 though)
]]>(I should also note that this is a very recent thing, first cropped up with GStreamer in Gnome after dmix had been working properly for a while. Doesn't seem to affect MPlayer either for some reason.)
Edit: in Xine it happens even with OpenGL video output (which works now that I've reinstalled Arch). Also, it only seems to be induced in GXine by dragging a Firefox window over the GXine window. In addition I have to mention that moving a Firefox window around anywhere will cause GXine's Goom display to become slow and jerky.
]]>jack is better than dmix in this respect.
]]>(FWIW, yes, I have disabled the libvisual display, because that causes even worse skipping trouble.)
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