I'm running Mandrake 7.0. I use kmp3 to run music for a folk-dance group off of my laptop, but the playback skips every-so-often. I'm assuming that it's a buffer underrun, but I don't know how to monitor kmp3. It is most definitely intermittent, unrepeatable, indeterminate behavior and all of those other descriptions you learn in CSci when you have battling processes. I have a 233 Mhz Pentium with the Opl3SAx sound chipset and I use the standard drivers installed. kmp3 seems to use about 15% of the cpu and very little disk time. I've tried tuning with hdparm and removed the at and cron daemons. I run kmp3 at nice -19. Only one daemon, mdrecoveryd, seems to be running with a higher priority.(and I don't know what it does) I also tried alsaplayer, which also skips, and occasionally the sound drops out completely. Is there a debug mode or other way that I can monitor system performance so that I can look in (some) log file or messages file to see what else is happening when kmp3 skips? It looks like there is very little disk activity while running kmp3. Is it just accepted that kmp3 occasionally skips? (Am I missing some key tunable system parameter?) Any suggestions on other lists I can write to?