Dave,

Cycles can be stolen on the Mac by other than obvious applications.
Extensions of various kinds (INITs, etc.) are often the culprit, leading to
all kinds of strange timing problems, as can be readily discovered when
trying to do some isochronous task such as writing CDs.

I'd suggest trying two things:
* Use one of the process sniffer extensions (sigh...) now available as
shareware to report all running processes and their (approximate) time
consumption.  This will only catch the grossest causes.
* Use an extension manager (such as the standard one in Mac OS, or Conflict
Catcher) to do a binary search for the culprit -- easy to do if you have a
ready test to determine the presence or absence of your problem.  I use
Conflict Catcher to reboot my Mac with a minimal set of extensions when I'm
writing CDs.

BTW, even Apple extensions can be a problem.  Some Macs and hardware
configurations are notorious in this regard, e.g., the Express Modem, which
steals cycles at a very low level to replace a few dollars worth of modem
hardware!@#$!  I put a G3 accelerator card in my Performa 6400 at home, and
couldn't get it to work right again until I pulled out the Express Modem
and replaced it with a $39 external unit (doubling the transfer rate, too
:-)  Seems to me that that solved some problems in sound generation, too...

=====================================================
Mike Wirth
IBM Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, NWE/B2, San Jose, CA
95120-6099
Email: wirth at almaden.ibm.com    Ph: 408-927-1898    Fax: 408-927-4380



|--------+------------------------>
|        |          "David N.     |
|        |          Smith \(IBM\)"|
|        |          <dnsmith at watso|
|        |          n.ibm.com>    |
|        |                        |
|        |          05/06/2000    |
|        |          02:06 PM      |
|        |          Please respond|
|        |          to squeak     |
|        |                        |
|--------+------------------------>
  >-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
  |                                                                       |
  |       To:     Bob Arning <arning at charm.net>                           |
  |       cc:     <squeak at cs.uiuc.edu>                                    |
  |               From:                                                   |
  |               Subject:  Re: Playing AIFF sounds                       |
  |                                                                       |
  >-----------------------------------------------------------------------|




At 13:28 -0400 5/6/00, Bob Arning wrote:
>Dave,
>
>I just had some insight into the timing stuff I sent you yesterday - the
unexplained pauses only happened when I had another application running in
the background on the Mac. Is there anything else running on your PowerBook
when you hear the repeated sounds?
>
>Cheers,
>Bob

Hummm, yes: Eudora Pro, a phone book program, but typically no network
connection. Eudora 'should' be quiet and uneventful. I'll try to run 'bare'
and see what happens.

Dave
_______________________________
David N. Smith
IBM T J Watson Research Center
Hawthorne, NY
_______________________________
Any opinions or recommendations
herein are those of the author
and not of his employer.