Comment 6 for bug 345627

I experience similar sound glitches with Jaunty. Rhythmbox, Totem and especially flashplugin_nonfree (when playing Flash videos in Firefox) are affected. The notification sound in pidgin creates that rasping sound too. This sound bug sometimes makes the application crash.

Sometimes when I play a video, there is only this clicking/rasping sound and the video is playing like in slow motion. I noticed a similar effect after pausing a video for a longer time. I then have to restart Totem multiple times to make it play the video properly again. There is sometimes also an error message: "Failed to connect stream: Invalid argument". This error appears sometimes when I fast-forward a video in Totem or a song in Rhythmbox. I attached the Totem debug messages.
Since I experienced bug 320875 ("alsa-util.c: snd_pcm_avail_update() returned a value that is exceptionally large:") until it was fixed and the fix is only a temporary workaround, the real cause may be the same.