I play while listening to music almost all the time, and, honestly, do not experience any delays or chops, except when a very large file pops in (like ~20mb) i get stutters for 3-4 seconds.

I have 1gb ram, GeForce 6800gt and a celeron 3.06ghz, so not the best specs out there. 1,5gb ram is way more than enough to play Quake and listen to music at the same time. Must be something else that's wrong, mang.

I don't recognise difference, when i am playing with music (winamp)(single player\multiplayer) or not.
Now i have 2 giga ram, but even when i had 512 sdram and poor cpu, didnt feel diference . For me it is just deviation .1024 or much more megas and you care about 10 megas...dev...

@zoomer4

hm ,

there're some other thinks in winamp,that can increase performance try this

1. set in winamp internet connection to "no"

2. set "read metadata only if data is played" or to "leave metadata in background".

3. there are 2 priority modes in winamp to set ( not only 1 ) ,

one in playback called " playback priority" set it to lowest
second in genarel preferences " programm priority " set it to idle

hope i could help you with this, if it dont work ,i dunno anymore.

greetings U7TRAK1LL

Worked :