I've had the weird playback (I figured it was either a circular buffer
being picked up in the middle, or a swap of two buffers somewhere).

This happens for me on an Athlon tower, but only if system is quite busy
(e.g., running abcde).  Doing exactly the same kind of work on a much less
powerful laptop (233 Pentium) does not cause the same kind of
buffer-swapping---though more normal skipping sometimes happens if the
buffers starve.

It does NOT happen if the system is relatively idle.  I think that it only
has happened when abcde was simultaneously reading the CD and encoding a
previously-read track (and ogg123 was playing).  I haven't yet tried to
sort out exactly what's happening, but my impression was that it was
related to a high CPU activity, coupled with observation of Shrodinger's
Cat.

I considered posting to one of the lists about this, but I think that I
postponed that, since haven't yet determined a definite cause.


  ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu