[pygame] More Windows music problems

[John-Paul Gignac <jjgignac@ncln.ca>]

Hi there.

I'm consistently experiencing crackling noises when playing music
using Pygame on Windows XP.  I have not yet tried it on other versions
of Windows.  I'm using Pygame version 1.5.5D, and Python version 2.2.2.

Here's a small sample program that crackles:

------------------------------------
#!/usr/bin/python

import pygame, time

pygame.init()
pygame.mixer.music.load('song.mp3')
pygame.mixer.music.play(-1)

while 1: time.sleep(10)
------------------------------------

I should note that the same file played with Winamp on the same machine
sounds fine.  Also, the same crackling seems to occur regardless of the
filetype, or of the particular song.  I have tried a few different
songs, in XM, mp3 and wav formats.

To give you an idea of what I hear, the crackling is an occasional
'pop', or 'click', like the sound of a sudden drop or spike in the
soundwave, or like a short skip.  Its intensity varies from quiet to
loud.  I can hear anywhere from around 1 to 10 pops per five-second
interval.  The frequency seems to increase with the intensity of the
music, but I'm not completely sure of that.  Also, the clicks do not
occur at exactly the same times when playing the same file.

This problem does not occur on my Linux machine.

Please let me know if you can reproduce the problem (it's completely
consistent for me), or if you have any idea what could be causing this.

Thanks,
John-Paul Gignac