PULSEAUDIO Crackling / Distortion

Mixu · 2012-12-06 13:01:37

It seems I solved this by changing the default sample rate from 44100 to 48000

Nevermind... after a reboot it stills does some crackling, with and without tsched=0

Last edited by Mixu (2012-12-06 16:00:29)

boast · 2012-12-06 16:02:33

Mixu wrote:

It seems I solved this by changing the default sample rate from 44100 to 48000
Nevermind... after a reboot it stills does some crackling, with and without tsched=0

If you don't use the features of pulseaudio, I find just using plain ALSA to be the best.

Mixu · 2012-12-06 16:04:57

I don't know what are the benefits of pulseadio... so... I thinkg I won't be using it much
How can I go without PulseAudio? Because IIRC it was a dependency of Gnome3.

DaneM · 2012-12-08 09:39:17

I've just tried stopping pulseaudio (which took some doing, seeing as it was set to autospawn=yes), and as I should have expected, the crackling sound went away. Also, more surprisingly, I was able to play sound in multiple apps at once, without problems! It would seem that ALSA's been significantly "fixed" over the last 5 years or so. So, unless something comes up I have no further use for Pulse (thank goodness). Removed and happy.

Thanks, all.

--Dane

caarlos0 · 2012-12-08 13:06:31

Same here

carlos in carlos/  
› lspci | grep audio -i
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 06)

Any fix/workaround?

---

BTW: Pulseaudio from testing is broken too.

Last edited by caarlos0 (2012-12-08 21:30:23)

cbxbiker61 · 2015-04-28 09:08:15

While some of the above discussion is good it is missing an essential ingredient....specifically that the user has to be granted the authority to run real-time.

The pulse audio daemon in almost all installations (unless starting it as a system daemon as root) runs with the access granted to a particular user, so we have to give that user the right to run real-time processes. We can do that by creating /etc/security/limits.d/pulse-rt.conf consisting of the following (the critical parts are nice, rtprio ahd rttime):

@pulse-rt - core unlimited
@pulse-rt - memlock 512000
@pulse-rt - nice -11
@pulse-rt - rtprio 99
@pulse-rt - rttime 1000000

Create a pulse-rt group and put users that you want to grant real-time priority in that group.

The only other thing you may want to do is uncomment and change rlimit-rttime to 1000000 in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf. Theoretically you shouldn't really need to allow pulse-audio to run for 1sec uninterrupted, although the only pitfall of setting this would be if pulse audio's code was faulty and started eating 100% of a core.

An additional benefit to these changes, for those of us using the wine-pulse port, is that it also likes rtprio and rttime to be bumped up.

With these changes (and the default.pa tsched change) wine-pulse sounds nice and clean on my AMD Kabini 5350 systems.

/etc/pulse/default.pa:load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

Regards

ewaller · 2015-04-28 20:09:57

Hi cbxbiker61,

Welcome to Arch Linux. Thank you for the relevant input. This thread is a few years old and it is not likely the original posters are still fighting this -- Things have changes a lot since the last post.

I am going to go ahead and close this thread. If the conversation needs to continue, feel free to start a new thread and reference this one. That way the owner of the thread will be an active participant.

Thanks

ewaller · 2015-04-29 14:08:39

Reopened after communication with cbxbiker61

cbxbiker61 · 2015-04-30 12:50:07

OK, this should close out this problem on Kabini/Kaveri hardware.

I wasn't really satisfied that all of the above approaches were truly ideal, so I decided to dig into the kernel code and fix it properly. I came up with a test patch that worked perfectly on Kabini/Kaveri. Once I had a good test patch I fired off a copy to Alex Deucher at AMD for his review, and he came back with an official patch. This will be rolled into the stable linux trees at some point, in the meantime here it is.

0001-hda-set-proper-caps-for-newer-AMD-hda-audio-in-KB-KV.patch

From f8bfb9ccda6134d56eaa41500b48b2afd1787868 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Alex Deucher <alexander.deucher@amd.com>
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2015 14:56:07 -0400
Subject: [PATCH] hda: set proper caps for newer AMD hda audio in KB/KV

Fixes audio problems on newer asics.

Noticed by: Kelly Anderson <kelly@xilka.com>
Signed-off-by: Alex Deucher <alexander.deucher@amd.com>
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
---
sound/pci/hda/hda_intel.c | 4 ++++
1 file changed, 4 insertions(+)

diff --git a/sound/pci/hda/hda_intel.c b/sound/pci/hda/hda_intel.c
index a8a1e14..479ee25 100644
--- a/sound/pci/hda/hda_intel.c
+++ b/sound/pci/hda/hda_intel.c
@@ -2056,6 +2056,8 @@ static const struct pci_device_id azx_ids[] = {
{ PCI_DEVICE(0x1022, 0x780d),
.driver_data = AZX_DRIVER_GENERIC | AZX_DCAPS_PRESET_ATI_SB },
/* ATI HDMI */
+ { PCI_DEVICE(0x1002, 0x1308),
+ .driver_data = AZX_DRIVER_ATIHDMI_NS | AZX_DCAPS_PRESET_ATI_HDMI_NS },
{ PCI_DEVICE(0x1002, 0x793b),
.driver_data = AZX_DRIVER_ATIHDMI | AZX_DCAPS_PRESET_ATI_HDMI },
{ PCI_DEVICE(0x1002, 0x7919),
@@ -2064,6 +2066,8 @@ static const struct pci_device_id azx_ids[] = {
.driver_data = AZX_DRIVER_ATIHDMI | AZX_DCAPS_PRESET_ATI_HDMI },
{ PCI_DEVICE(0x1002, 0x970f),
.driver_data = AZX_DRIVER_ATIHDMI | AZX_DCAPS_PRESET_ATI_HDMI },
+ { PCI_DEVICE(0x1002, 0x9840),
+ .driver_data = AZX_DRIVER_ATIHDMI_NS | AZX_DCAPS_PRESET_ATI_HDMI_NS },
{ PCI_DEVICE(0x1002, 0xaa00),
.driver_data = AZX_DRIVER_ATIHDMI | AZX_DCAPS_PRESET_ATI_HDMI },
{ PCI_DEVICE(0x1002, 0xaa08),
--
1.8.3.1

Last edited by cbxbiker61 (2015-04-30 12:51:15)

DaneM · 2015-05-20 19:49:26

Great! Thanks for your work, cbxbiker61!

fixles · 2015-05-23 00:29:57

Hello,

I used to have similar problems with distorted sound in certain applications. It seemed to be that from either version 3 or 4 of pulseaudio they moved to a time based thing that needs to sync with hardware. Here are my notes on how I fixed it, Maybe it will work for you if it gets worse or better maybe these are the settings you need to change with different values.

Hope this helps.

# Problem slow recording with audacity etc from pulseaudio on laptop.
- uncomment these 2 lines in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf
(77) default-sample-rate = 44100
(78) alternate-sample-rate = 48000

# PULSE AUDIO UNDERRUN USB HEADSET
- uncomment or add to /etc/pulse/daemon.conf
default-fragment-size-msec = 5

# Arch not recording flash / web videos
- Flash uses alsa
- install pulseaudio-alsa

harryharryharry · 2015-06-16 14:08:14

I have a similar but not identical issue: crackling / choppy playback with vlc, and audio stops within 1 second with amarok when using pulseaudio over LAN. (pulseaudio via local soundcard works fine)

When I use a backup of a couple of weeks ago audio plays over network without any problems, but whenever I do a fresh install I get the sound issue, even when I copy over the /etc/pulse and ~/.config/pulse directories from the backup.

Does anyone have any suggestions ? Logically I assume I must be missing some package when doing the fresh install since its not a config issue (or else using the config dirs from the backup would have solved the issue).

(btw I can perform "sudo pacman -Syu" when using the backup and sound works without problems, so I don't think it's a problem in newer versions of some package.)

ifch0o1 · 2015-12-30 13:27:19

Hello, I have similar problem, but with the difference - I got bad sound quality and crackling everywhere (system wide) (Windows 7 too). I am using ubuntu.

My sound also have one more common issue: (it's common but without the crackling)
1. while the sound output is low, no sound produced.
2. while the output hit medium dB only little crackling/noice is produced (with almost no other sound).
3. while the output hit high dB the sound is very poor. for example: 150% volume - I can hear the song, but with very bad quality and little distortion.

I think my issue is mixed and may have hardware problem, but i'm not sure. As I see Azalia HDAs have many issues with crackling and noise.

Device:

80:01.0 Audio device: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237A/VT8251 HDA Controller (rev 10)

I think is not very good recognized, cuz ubuntu says the card is:

snd_hda_intel
#and also founded but not used:
snd_hda_intel_realtek_codec

The codec is: Realtek ALC861

BIOS says: Azalia HDA Controller (yup)
Windows 7 says: I got no drivers for this thing. Windows XP drivers Installed on Windows 7 says: The issue above.

I am currently installing win XP live on USB to try it.

Last edited by ifch0o1 (2015-12-30 13:35:11)

Rasi · 2015-12-30 14:06:59

3. while the output hit high dB the sound is very poor. for example: 150% volume - I can hear the song, but with very bad quality and little distortion.

uhm, this is to be expected? distortions already begin at around 80% normally

also when you experience this in linux and windows, why post in a pulseaudio thread?

Last edited by Rasi (2015-12-30 14:07:44)

ewaller · 2015-12-30 16:57:10

ifch0o1,

Welcome to Arch Linux. Unfortunately, there is not much we can do to help you. Certainly not with Windows and probably not with Ubuntu.
Closing this old thread.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fo … bumping.22
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fo … pport_ONLY

Arch Linux

#26 2012-12-06 13:01:37

Re: PULSEAUDIO Crackling / Distortion

#27 2012-12-06 16:02:33

Re: PULSEAUDIO Crackling / Distortion

#28 2012-12-06 16:04:57

Re: PULSEAUDIO Crackling / Distortion

#29 2012-12-08 09:39:17

Re: PULSEAUDIO Crackling / Distortion

#30 2012-12-08 13:06:31

Re: PULSEAUDIO Crackling / Distortion

#31 2015-04-28 09:08:15

Re: PULSEAUDIO Crackling / Distortion

#32 2015-04-28 20:09:57

Re: PULSEAUDIO Crackling / Distortion

#33 2015-04-29 14:08:39

Re: PULSEAUDIO Crackling / Distortion

#34 2015-04-30 12:50:07

Re: PULSEAUDIO Crackling / Distortion

#35 2015-05-20 19:49:26

Re: PULSEAUDIO Crackling / Distortion

#36 2015-05-23 00:29:57

Re: PULSEAUDIO Crackling / Distortion

#37 2015-06-16 14:08:14

Re: PULSEAUDIO Crackling / Distortion

#38 2015-12-30 13:27:19

Re: PULSEAUDIO Crackling / Distortion

#39 2015-12-30 14:06:59

Re: PULSEAUDIO Crackling / Distortion

#40 2015-12-30 16:57:10

Re: PULSEAUDIO Crackling / Distortion

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