[NTLUG:Discuss] inconsistent sound

[Alvin Goats]

Does it happen with the same song? I've seen some of this with some
mp3's and it appears to be from changing rates, i.e. 80 kbps to 160 kbps
down to 128 kbps... 

Another issue could be with the hardrive. Sometimes data doesn't move as
fast as expected, like a cache may be collecting consecutive  sectors
while the song may be spread over several different cylinders, not all
of which are concurrent or will fall within the cache window. Disk I/O
in the hardware may not be noticed on any monitoring software, but the
realtime lag of filling and flushing buffers might be noticed with
something like music, burning CD's and DVD's (the speed drops). 

This often happens if there is a lot of disk I/O going on in the same
partition as the music that is being saved, or if the data is being
saved into different locations due to fragmentation at the time of
recording. Regardless, if the file is fragmented 

Alvin