I was just playing Digibooster tracks in Digibooster 2.21 (registered), and flipped back to my Ambient screen for a moment to do something, then when I switched back to the Digibooster screen, the song that was playing lost it's timing and began to play really fast.
I loaded another song and it did the same thing, in fact all audio sounded off until I rebooted the machine.
Why must it do this?

I'd similar strange problems with EFIKA sound too - sometimes the same phenomenon you discribed, sometimes sound stops and did'nt come back without reboot. It seems that (in some cases) switching between tasks is confusing EFIKAs sound.device....
This behaviour I can see since the first MOS-release - so I think it's a essential thing in kernel..... It seems also that it depends to the mainboard too. Some EFIKAs need 2-4 reboots to activate sound, while others do it at first reboot..... maybe a timing problem....
It is'nt exactly reproducable - so I think it's not easy to find the reason for.....

In the time I've owned this, I've only spoke to one person who claims his Efika never acts up like mine does. Everyone else has their strange issues. I thought it would be a good device to test my Odamex Project on, but until Odamex goes GL, it does not have the horse power to pull it off with a decent frame rate.
My second thought was that this would be a great box to use Digibooster on, but alas, there are sound issues. Same goes for other classic Amiga software, it runs fast, but with the audio issues are always a deal breaker. All in all Efika is just a bad investment unless I guess you are dedicating it to a single task in a factory or something. If these issues were to be resolved, it would totally be worth the huge sum of money I dumped into this P.O.S.

With the availability of MorphOS for Mac hardware Efika just became obsolete. Although I like mine it became more or less retrired (actually I used it today once again). But when it was new it was a nice board (if it would be still in production and came with more RAM it would still be interesting). I mean Genesi were quite on track. It's not (only) their fault that the Efika has so many issues (Genesi could have done things different - most importantly the RAM of course). But look to the trend. Today's Raspberry pi and the likes are all pursueing a quite similar approach. Genesi were pretty on track, but the 5200B is rather poor/weak/crppled and the board design not compensating the issues). Still a shame that the 512x Efika didn't came and even more a shame that freescale never went beyond the e300/400 in their mobileGT SoC line. With at least a bit more juice these SoCs would be pretty interesing for tiny low cost boards a la Raspberry pi.

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some years ago I did a small app to trigger the "Alvin and the chimpmunks" bug. I sent it to MorphOS team. It just switched screens quickly when sound was being played. Efika DMA management probably sucks and i guess it won't be fixed

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Since SAM460ex has some weird Cirrus Logic or so sound card, hope such hustle can be avoided.

> SAM460ex has some weird Cirrus Logic or so sound card

According to http://www.sam4x0.com/sam460ex.html it's a Realtek ALC655 codec.

This really sucks on another level because if I can't use the thing to my liking, then I got to sell the thing and I don't feel comfortable selling it to someone unless they know what they are getting them selves into first. Sigh... wasted money.