Free Software's new audio heir apparent

I'm running a 0.6.x rhythmbox with a 2.6.5 kernel, and oss through the oss-alsa compatibility layer, and I get no crackles. (You do have the O(1) scheduler and kernel pre-emption enabled, right?) So I'm thinking there may be another issue here, though you could certainly try a newer rhythmbox/gstreamer.

The only thing I can think of is, I got crackles when scrolling on my old laptop, which was about at the threshold of what could decode music fast enough, and had an el-cheapo onboard sound chip. Or maybe it's some interaction in gstreamer - sound card driver - kernel, or ... ?