Comment 4 for bug 368121

Your behavior may be normal, drapsag, but there's no sample rate conversion involved with my setup.

I ran oprofile to see what was chewing the CPU, and here are the top entries from the log...

CPU: CPU with timer interrupt, speed 0 MHz (estimated)
Profiling through timer interrupt
samples % linenr info image name app name symbol name
16416 68.4485 (no location information) no-vmlinux no-vmlinux (no symbols)
6129 25.5556 (no location information) libmad.so.0.2.1 libmad.so.0.2.1 (no symbols)
413 1.7221 pcm_dither.c:75 mpd mpd pcm_dither_24_to_16
367 1.5303 (no location information) libc-2.9.so libc-2.9.so (no symbols)
94 0.3919 (no location information) libglib-2.0.so.0.2000.1 libglib-2.0.so.0.2000.1 (no symbols)
89 0.3711 mp3_plugin.c:1061 mpd mpd mp3_decode
74 0.3086 (no location information) libasound.so.2.0.0 libasound.so.2.0.0

So looks like it's either a kernel problem, or libmad. My sound card is snd_via82xx.

(Not sure how Ubuntu has libmad 0.2.1, given that the current version on the MAD web site is 0.15.1b.)