[Openal] Issues porting to Linux

[Nolan Darilek]

This question may be too vague, but I thought that it couldn't hurt  
to ask.

I'm trying to take my game, which runs rather nicely under OS X, over  
to Linux. Most of it works fine, but the OpenAL sounds are very  
jittery. Furthermore, the jitter seems to come and go, and I can't  
seem to narrow it down to any specific point in my game. Sometimes it  
happens near the very beginning where I've only got music and another  
sound or two playing. At other times, the sound just goes jittery mid- 
game.

This is under Ubuntu running under ALSA. The card is an onboard Intel  
HDA chipset, which isn't as good as the pro firewire interface on the  
mac, but it seems like it should be good enough to not jitter when  
mixing a few sounds. I don't seem to have any issues with other sound  
applications, and there's an /etc/openalrc pointing openal to the  
default ALSA device.

Also, the game seems to perform better in terms of FPS than it does  
on OS X. Initially I thought that perhaps this was less and that my  
game sounds' positions weren't being updated frequently enough, but  
this doesn't seem to be the case. I also tried locking the framerate  
to the same rough values as it was on the mac, but this had no  
effect. And sometimes it sounds quite good,--for quite long stretches  
at times--so I'm leaning away from something in the game code itself  
and toward an implementation/hardware/context initialization value  
difference.

Again, this may be very vague. I know that configuring Linux audio is  
full of such vagueries, which is part of why I don't use it regularly  
today. :) But if anyone can recommend something that I might check  
out then I'd appreciate it. I'm running into all kinds of little  
differences between the implementations that I'm needing to account  
for, so perhaps this is one such.