Confusing audio issue(Newbie alert)

Ok, frustrations over Vista, yadda yadda, compelled me to finally give Linux a shot a couple months back, and I've been running it on my laptop flawlessly. Finally decided to partition off a section of my desktop HD and throw Ubuntu 7.04 on it.

Everything seems to be working ok, but for one issue: Audio in SL is delayed by about a second from when things actually happen. Hit a wall, I get the "bump" sound a second late - start flying, the wind starts a second late, click a menu box, hear the confirmation click a second late... whatever.

As far as I've been able to determine, sound works in the rest of my system just fine... No noticeable delay syncing the audio and video streams on a DVD, other 3D accelerated games - Quake engine derivatives, for example - work fine... Just seems to be second life.

I've got both a SBLive! Value and the built-in audio of my motherboard (Abit AW9D). For reasons that have more to do with windows XP than linux (Which I still use), I use motherboard sound for playback, the only reason I have the SBLive is that the microphone line on the motherboard audio is crap. I set the mixer control to use my motherboard soundcard by default and everything seems to work fine - everywhere but SL.

Any ideas? Or is this a known issue that I just missed? I did try to seach for answers, but couldn't come up with anything.

*edit* I don't know if it's doing this on my laptop or not. My laptop is right on the borderline of being able to run SL... I can just barely log in and check my IMs, I don't bother trying to move, or... anything. My performance is literally measured in seconds-per-frame if I try to actually do anything, so I don't bother.

Without knowing the details of the hardware you're using, all I can do is suggest a couple of things:

Go into the SecondLife folder, open the script "secondlife" in a text editor (my favorite is kwrite) and remove the "#" from the following lines (they are near the top of the page):
#export LL_BAD_ESD=x
#export LL_BAD_ALSA=x
That will prevent the SL client from using ESD or ALSA.

Next, go into your system setup under the audio section and select "OSS" as the default sound system. Reboot and try it out.

Another thing you could look at, if that doesn't seem to work, is to disable all audio hardware that you're not using. There could be a conflict between competing audio drivers.

Beyond that, it's possible that SL is prioritizing processing power to the visual stuff to the detriment of the audio. I don't know a great deal about the hardware in laptops, but I understand the video can, or does, share RAM with the system instead of maintaining its own. You could look at BIOS settings to see if there's something there that could improve performance, and/or invest in a RAM upgrade. With SL, the more RAM you have, the better!

A final possiblity (related to the RAM issue): there is a setting in the SL program itself (under preferences (Ctrl-P), Tab: Adv. Graphics | Graphics Card Memory) that allows you to limit the amount of graphics memory used by the SL client.

I hope this helps.

Adamas

It's been a while since I posted this, thought I'd post a followup, sorry things have been a bit hectic...

Thanks for trying to help Adamas, but I think I gave you a false impression, I'm trying to run SL on my desktop, my laptop just can't run SL really.

I tried your suggestions regarding commenting out certain lines, no dice. Same with most of your other suggestions.

I've since tried several other distros; The same audio delay (In SL and SL only, I have now confirmed, it happens in -nothing- else) happens in MEPIS, Mint (My current favorite distro) and Ubuntu, and but does not happen in PCLinuxOS or Fedora 7. As near as I can tell, it's a problem only in distros that are derived from Debian. Unfortunately, other programs (That I need more) are much easier to set up in Debian-based distros, so I don't see changing to another flavor of Linux just for SL.

It happens in both Gnome and KDE, so that isn't the problem.

I switched to using my Sound Blaster Live, no effect.

Does anyone else have any ideas? I'd really like to get SL running right :/