Odd sound issue

My problem seems unusual. Will try to be as descriptive as I can. When I use speakers, I get really bad static with certain stuff and sometimes the sound cuts out with a slurp followed by a quick constant thump, and that’s it, and then I have to reset the card… with the static back again. When I use headphones, there’s no static but when I try playing sound, it cuts out almost right away - which also happens on the speakers at times - and I have to reset. Also, MIDI doesn’t work in Wine either. Tried winecfg to no avail. Does not happen in other OS’s. What’s goin on?

Thanks

Reference the noise when using your speakers, it could be feedback from your mic. You may wish to take a look at disabling your mic when not in use.

Also, look at reducing the software volume control levels to 50% to 60%, as if you go higher than that you can get distortion.

If you believe it is still worth pursuing this further, then IMHO it would help if you provided more detailed information on your hardware. The best way to do that is to run the two audio diagnostic scripts from the openSUSE audio troubleshooting guide. They will each generate a URL, and post here those generated URLs:
SDB:AudioTroubleshooting - openSUSE

Welcome to our forum, and thank you for participating.

The first wget script keeps saying name/service unknown. Tried it many times to verify spelling.

Static now with headphones too. Now sure why that happened…

Sorry, not sure why I said there was no static the first time; it was there before. Cutting volume down does not seem to help.

What do I do about the wget line?

Try this instead: just right click and download the files to your hard drive.
alsa-info.sh: http://hg.alsa-project.org/alsa/raw-file/tip/alsa-info.sh #and run with: bash alsa-info.sh
tsalsa: http://home.cfl.rr.com/infofiles/tsalsa #and run (with root permissions): bash tsalsa

Pretty sure I’ve done it. Hope you can review it. I’ll be waiting for further instructions.

You need to paste the output URL (here) that those scripts create.

Sorry, will run it again. Also, cutting down volume a bit within VLC (what I use for media) actually does help. I was just cutting it down with kmix which did nothing. Do you know why off the top of your head?

vlc in particular is very bad at causing distortion in audio playback. Try smplayer or libxine1/xine-ui and you will see a significant improvement over vlc for audio (lack of distortion). vlc’s custom audio control must be left at very very low levels (maybe 20% or so).

I find 80% about the max one can go with other volume controls, else one is into distortion.

Well here’s the thing at the moment. Long story hopefully shortened, I usually triple-boot XP, PCLinuxOS and OpenSUSE for troubleshooting/fun/experimental purposes. In terms of XP, I tried looking for what should’ve been a quick file on the net and stumbled upon that god-forsaken Antivirus '08 rogue-spyware crap that installs itself onto the system with fake scans/results (my God, whoever writes this **** should be incarcerated). Could not rid my XP partition of it no matter what, but when I thought I did, couldn’t log in anymore, so I imagine the registry got corrupt. Well because of that, I went through multiple reinstalls of PCLinuxOS, OpenSUSE 10.3 and 11 (didn’t like it, sorry) because XP boot loader doesn’t find Linux systems, raising screen resolution too high while forgetting how to set back down in console, and grub difficulties. It’s been wonderful (/sarcasm).

Back on topic, is it because VLC is still relatively new? It also kept stopping DVD videos whenever I tried to activate menus. Kaffeine seems to work well in PCLinuxOS but I still have to redo Opensuse again. I’ll see if VLC still has issues and then take up your other players if it does.

Thanx!!