Sound Skips (ALSA)

[Slip]

insomnia vitaliy # lspci -v | grep -i audio
0000:00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801BA/BAM AC'97 Audio (rev 04)

I am having some problems with my sound, I have everything configured and everything appeared to be normal. The only problem I had then was I did not have multiplexing sound and the following has fixed it.

insomnia vitaliy # cat /home/vitaliy/.asoundrc
pcm.nforce-hw {
        type hw
        card 0
}
pcm.!default {
        type plug
        slave.pcm "nforce"
}
pcm.nforce {
        type dmix
        ipc_key 1234
        ipc_perm 0660
        slave {
                pcm "hw:0,0"
                period_time 0
                period_size 1024
                buffer_size 4096
                #rate 44100
                rate 48000
        }
}
ctl.nforce-hw {
        type hw
        card 0
}

Everything works just fine now and got multiplexing sound working. The only thing is the sound skips whenever I am using my browser for example and click back button it would skip for a second. Or for example when I would click different news story in Lifera (GTK2 RSS reader) the sound would skip with every click. Just skips whenever I am using different applications.

The box is Pentium 4 2GHz with 512MBram running 2.6.11-gentoo-r11 kernel (alsa is built into the kernel).

Any idea what is causing this and how do I fix this?

One person suggested not including ALSA in the kernel and using alsa-driver instead. That helped a bit but the sound still skips under some light load (not anything serious like compiling three applications at the same time but something as basic as having three tabs open in Firefox).

media-sound/alsa-driver-1.0.9b

(I have posted it on Gentoo Forums and got one response over a period of 12 hours or so.)

I should also mention that this is only true for movies, regular songs and radio does not skip.

[Slip]

Someone at Gentoo Forums has fixed the issue for me, increasing the buffer size in .asoundrc did it.