SUSE 10.2 / Toshiba A50 - audio playback working, but odd...

[Gurner]

I've been using a Toshiba A50 with SUSE since 9.3. All releases seem to have worked fine - audio, video, 3D graphics, no problems.

I have recently installed SUSE 10.2 on my A50 and, whilst everything seems to be working ok, I have had issues with audio playback. I am trying to play Ogg files which were created using SUSE 10.1. The file will play back fine for a minute or so then the track will randomly slow down and speed back up again - a similar effect to slowing down a turntable platter.

Initially, I had installed a number of things before I noticed this problem, so I started a fresh installation - default, no additional software, but the problem persisted. I tried again using ReiserFS (not ext3, thinking that there may be some HD issues), but the problem remains.

This seems to happen regardless of audio front-end. I mainly use Amarok, but the problem is there when using playmus.

The Toshiba A50 reports the audio controller as an 82801 AC'97.

Any assistance with this issue would be greatly appreciated.

[Gurner]

Ok - got a little more info on this.

It appears to be an issue with Alsa and the 82801 audio controller. The test.wav played by the alsaconfig suffers from the same (random) problem.

I've tried changing a couple of things on the sound card advanced options, mainly the ac97_clock value (from default of auto-detect to a fixed value), but I can't seem to solve this.

I've also done a fair bit of searching on this, but all I can find is issues where the sound doesn't work. That's definitely not the issue here - it works, but the speed (timing?) seems to fluctuate randomly.

Is there any tracing I could do on this? Is this a known issue? Anyone else out there with the same issue..?!