[CentOS] choppy audio playback

Fri Oct 9 21:54:28 UTC 2009
ken <gebser at mousecar.com>

Oh, wise Centaurs,

On the last install (Suse) I was running on this old notebook (Dell
i600m) the audio worked fine.  Specifically, Realplayer and onsite
players (like you get at NPR and other sites) and youtube played just
fine.  But with this current install (CentOS 5.3, fully updated) all of
those sources just mentioned play choppy.  It's like an echo so severe
that it's impossible to make out what's being said or played.  Oddly,
piping "festival" into "play" works fine as does using "play" on wav
files.  Realplay (Gold 11) plays mp3 files just fine too.  Anybody else
experiencing audio torture?

lspci -vv says I have:

....
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM
(ICH4/ICH
4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Dell Unknown device 011e
        Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop-
ParErr- Step
ping- SERR- FastB2B-
        Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort-
<TAbort
- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR-
        Latency: 0
        Interrupt: pin B routed to IRQ 5
        Region 0: I/O ports at b800 [size=256]
        Region 1: I/O ports at bc40 [size=64]
        Region 2: Memory at f4fff800 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512]
        Region 3: Memory at f4fff400 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256]
        Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
                Flags: PMEClk- DSI- D1- D2- AuxCurrent=375mA
PME(D0+,D1-,D2-,D3h
ot+,D3cold+)
                Status: D0 PME-Enable- DSel=0 DScale=0 PME-

....

-- 
War is a failure of the imagination.
        --William Blake