Sound card buffering, or network streaming?

[engelsman]

After some jiggery-pokery and help from #lunar, I managed to get my sound card configured, and can play Flash Video and Real Audio in Firefox. It's outlined in my User Talk page.

However, tonight I just discovered a test for music perception via http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4655352.stm and it was clear that there were severe buffering or streaming delays, although I'd never noticed before. I didn't have problems when I repeated the test on this WinXP laptop.

Does anyone have pointers on improving the ALSA sound buffering or the network streaming, or is this just something I have to live with?

[sofar]

alsa itself is not capable of doing any intelligent buffering at all. It even has rather modest buffers for playback.

You should investigate the application that plays through alsa. Most of these (mplayer, xmms, etc) have more elaborate buffer settings that can be tweaked.