I'm editing audio files with speech in Audacity, marking particular types of speech. I just noticed that files edited in Windows have different intervals marked than files edited in Ubuntu. After testing and confirming this error, it seems that the audio playback in Ubuntu clips the sound too early from the end (early offset), which causes the person doing the editing to mark the interval wrongly. Interestingly, the error appears in Audacity and VLC (which I sometimes use for playback), but NOT Banshee.

Since both Audacity and VLC have this problem, I assume it is not application-specific. I don't know why Banshee handles this without problem though... Are there any ALSA or Pulseaudio settings that are likely to cause this problem (I know very little about either)?

The task itself does not appear to consume large amounts of resources, but I am on an old laptop, so here are my specs: Ubuntu 11.10. Dell XPS m1210 1.6 GHz Intel Core, 2 x 512 Mb 667 MHz RAM, Audio device: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01).

Audacity settings: Device Interface: ALSA (cannot select anything else)