Arch Linux

rh995

Member

Registered: 2012-03-09

Posts: 76

Pianobar audio problems

I am having some serious issues with pianobar's audio: when I try to listen, most of the time it plays extremely slowly and with pauses between each brief section of sound. It creates a kind of `crackling' effect. It is unusable when it does this. I am using pulseaudio for my audio management.

I had it working yesterday with the default configuration in libao.conf without pulseaudio-alsa installed, but today it's back to what it was before, and I don't know why it would have changed.

Things I have tried:

setting libao.conf to ``default_driver=pulse'', but this produces the `crackling' mentioned above.

setting libao.conf to the default, this does not sound any noise if I don't have pulseaudio-alsa installed, and if I do, I get the error ``Unable to open ALSA device 'default' for playback => Device or resource busy''

using alsa-oss as described in the arch wiki. This produces about the same effect as using pulseaudio, with the interesting behavior that the audio quality improves when I have pavucontrol open. It does not improve enough to be actually listenable, however.

So I'm at a loss as to what to do or what the issue could be. Any help would be appreciated. Right now I have to use flash to listen to Pandora, and it is killing my system's resources to be using chrome.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,742

Re: Pianobar audio problems

What are you trying to play through? An USB headset? they don't support tsched and thus occasionally can run into issues like that. Since pianobar isn't latencycritical you might want to start it with PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 for example or adjust the latency for the pianobar stream within pavucontrol (there should be a text box allowing you to adjust this)  (provided you have the pulse driver option set in libao)

Last edited by V1del (2015-12-17 09:54:28)

djreep81

Member

Registered: 2014-12-20

Posts: 2

Re: Pianobar audio problems

I ran into this same issue.  I am using a USB wireless headset (beats studio).  This solution worked for me from this link (https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=164959).  Seems like a hack but it works.  I just export the PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30 before running pianobar.

$ export PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30
$ pianobar

banzr

Member

Registered: 2016-11-28

Posts: 1

Re: Pianobar audio problems

Excellent fix! setting  PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30 worked perfectly! I run pianobar on multiple computers and I've only stumbled on this issue with my gaming rig. My audio is coming through HDMI. Is anyone else using HDMI to pass through their audio?