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Apologies if this has been asked elsewhere. I did look but couldn't find what I needed.

I have copied my music collection from OSX to Ubuntu. My music is a mixture of MP3, AAC, ALAC and AIFF files. The files are stored on a new WD Green 3TB drive mounted as /media/

I have an Arcam mWave USB sound device in the back of the computer and an Arcam DAC sitting behind the sound system. Ubuntu does recognise this and sends sound out through it.

Under OSX there is no problem at all!!!

With Ubuntu there is constant clicking, popping and other artifacts getting in the way of the music.

Thinking it was hardware I changed the audio leads and the power supply but still the issue remains.

Out of curiosity I played music directly from a CD on the Ubuntu machine and it worked fine. No pops, crackles, etc.

The problem, therefore, seems to be when playing music files from the hard drive.

So I thought, lets rip a CD with Ubuntu and play the files it creates. Still the pops and crackles so the source files should be assumed okay.

I don't know enough about the sound system on Ubuntu, the relationship between ALSA and Pulseaudio and how it all fits together. Equally I don't know how to resolve my problem.

The new PC is supposed to be my media centre machine and was built with that in mind.

All help appreciated.

UPDATE - I have tracked the source of the problem to Ubuntu's handling of the USB soundcard (Arcam wave). Using the internal Intel sound card I cannot reproduce the problem. The issue is only when using the USB sound device.

I have searched around on the net and found many similar issues regarding USB sound cards for earlier versions of Ubuntu but nothing for 13.10.

Equally suggestions of recompiling kernels etc. fills me with a little dread.

Does anyone have any useful and satisfactory solutions to the problem?

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