Choppy sound streams, KDE/ALSA

Debian (KDE 3.5.7) w/ Intel C2D 4300, 2 GB RAM, Nvidia Geforce 8600GT (Nvidia driver 100.14.11)
Second Life version 1.18.1(2).

All sound streams (tried from 24 kbps mp3 and higher) are extremely choppy for me. I have tried changing graphics resolutions and detail, using full screen/window mode etc to no help. Sound works fine on all other parts of my system (however it's not available while I'm in SL). Sound works great in SL on my Mac so it shouldn't be a connection problem.

I searched the forums but couldn't quite come up with a solution. I'm guessing it has to do with the sound system. It's a vanilla KDE with ALSA. Disabling ESD/OSS in the startup script didn't help. Anyone know which packages I might be missing?

I have a similar problem, also using Debian. I get rid of most of the choppiness by using aoss. For example:

aoss ./secondlife --autologin

That did indeed help a bit. It is still choppy, but a lot less like you said. Thanks!

Anyone else with ideas on solving this?

(Just for reference, the package for aoss on Debian systems would be alsa-oss.)

I had the same problem. I can get perfect sound launching the esd daemon before the SecondLife client, and decommenting the lines
export LL_BAD_OSS=x
export LL_BAD_ALSA=x
in the secondlife script.

(And remove the aoss wrapper if you added it).

Will SL share audio with other applications when you do that? The reason I tried aoss in the first place was so that my alarms and such would still be audible when I'm running SL. I don't have ESD installed, but I'll happily try it if it'll make things work better.

Sadly, I fear not, unless the application has the ability to use the esd daemon as audio output, but to now is the only way I can have perfect audio in SL. Using the aoss wrapper gave me some glitches as in your case and kept printing wanings on the console about broken driver or something like that. I think you can give it a try and choose by yourself what it's better for you.