[ale] mp3's and skipping

[Joe Bayes]

Whenever I use mpg123 (or anything else I've been able to find, for
that matter) to play an mp3, certain actions cause the mp3 to skip, or
cause crackles in the output. Causing the screen to redraw a lot, for
example, or switching my mouse between two windows too quickly. Even
gqmpeg's once-per-second screen update causes a very noticable blip in
the music, although iconifying the gqmpeg window 

I've tried setting the buffer on my mp3 player to ridiculously small
values, ridiculously large values, and everything in between (small
values make the problem worse; ridiculously large ones cause my
machine to start swapping in addition to the usual blips in the
music). 

I've seen comments about this problem on mp3 newsgroups, but only
under MS OS's. They say that frequently an optimization in the video
card driver causes the video card to lock up the pci bus for a short
amount of time while queueing up several updates to send at once, and
that the problem is solvable by turning off the optimization in the
driver software.

I have seen no mentions of such an optimization in the Linux drivers,
nor of a way to turn it off if it does actually exist. 

I've got a SB16 Value PnP (ISA), and an ATI Mach64 (PCI). I had this
problem on a SuperMicro P55CMS with an Intel P100, but ever since I
upgraded to an ABIT BH-6-2 with a Celery 300A it's gotten worse.

Has anybody else had this problem? And fixed it? Does anybody have a
similar hardware setup who can confirm that they _don't_ have the
problem? 

Thanks.

--joe