Sound is staticky / skips if i click other windows

In the sound preferences if i set the sound to ALSA sound skips like a scratched CD when i move, maximize, open, close window.

If i set the sound to PulseAudio sound skips on everything (vlc ,banshee)except Totem.

On both of these options Banshee is rendered totally unusable

If i set the sound to ESD, than VLC and Banshee work fine though VLC still skips a little bit though less than before. Totem however will no longer be able to play most of the files it could before without extreme unbarable static. Though some files it will still play fine.

HOWEVER with all three of these there is no skipping whatsoever when i play sound on youtube videos in the browser whereas if i play the same video in .flv on a media player the same problems persist… so the browsers seem unaffected

OSS is by far the best in terms of skipping, none whatsoever. However OSS has a constant steady crackle behind anything that is playing. The crackle is low but still irritating and the crackling makes my ears ring after but i can still listen to music and just try my best to ignore it much like listening to a radio station that barely comes in.

So how do i either to stop the static behind OSS… or stop the skipping with ALSA and Pulse, or stop the crackling in ESD or OSS??

This reads like a problem on a gnome desktop. I found pulse in gnome on openSUSE a royal pain for sound, which is too bad as I really liked the look and feel of gnome (after fixing a few other irritations that is). Anyway, take a look at step-7 here:
SDB:AudioTroubleshooting - openSUSE
… please check out ALL the links. The information of possible fixes is mostly in the links on not directly in the troubleshooting guide (thats because I could not be bothered to retype it into the guide).

That seems to help. Now after doing that when i set sound playback to Pulseaudio the sound goes in and out (mostly no sound) like morse code now, and with ESD it still has the same problem with totem being crackly. But when its set to ALSA seems to work a lot better now although VLC does skip a bit but only when i minimize its own window, it skipped a lot more before. Other than that its pretty much skip free now. Tolerable finally. Thanks.

Gnome user ? I found Gnome quite painful in trying to remove these effects, which I believe are mostly all caused by pulse audio. Some times switching to “oss” helps. Other times not using the gstreamer backend but instead using the “xine” backend helps.

But in the end, the need to fiddle here has kept me away from Gnome and using KDE. I refuse to fiddle.