On my FC14 machine, I had a problem with Flash (64bit) audio playback: the sound on sites other than Youtube would stutter terribly. It appears that this a systematic problem; but luckily there is a fix!

Check out Ahmed Abdo's post on Flash audio stutter for the details. Works perfectly for me!

Details: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=638477

The bug is triggered by a change in glibc. Who proposed the fix? Linus Torvalds. So I guess the following isn't quite true?

I love the pragmatism from his part:

So in the kernel we have a pretty strict "no regressions" rule, and that if people depend on interfaces we exported having side effects that weren't intentional, we try to fix things so that they still work unless there is a major reason not to. So I'm disappointed glibc just closes this as NOTABUG. There's no real reason to do the copy backwards that I can see, so doing it that way is just stupid. But whatever. You can do a LD_PRELOAD trick to get a sane memcpy(), and it does indeed fix the sound for me. [...] The fact that the glibc people don't do that, and that this hasn't been elevated despite clearly being a big usability problem (normal users SHOULD NOT HAVE TO google bugzillas and play with LD_PRELOAD to have a working system), is just sad.

Although overall, as an end user it the conversation around this bug and its persistence makes me sad. I know it's selfish not to care about the technical superiority of a solution or about who is to blame here - but I'd just like to have my smooth Flash playback...