Arch Linux

Massena

Member

Registered: 2021-05-08

Posts: 1

Strange beep when audio play with pulseaudio

Hello,

I recently upgraded Arch Linux. Before, sound worked properly, but after, I had no sound (my sound device wasn't detected).
I reinstalled pulseaudio and then my sound device was correctly recognized.

But now, when some music/sound starts to play, after ~1/2 minutes the music suddenly stops to play and instead a high-pitched beep is played.
When I mute the output with pavucontrol, the beep remains, the only way to make it disappear is to kill pulseaudio.

Here is the output of "cat /proc/asound/cards"

$ cat /proc/asound/cards
 0 [rt5650         ]: SOF - sof-bytcht rt5650
                      sof-bytcht rt5650
 1 [PCH            ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel PCH
                      HDA Intel PCH at 0xd1314000 irq 315

Pulseaudio don't report any specifics logs, even with a high verbosity
Without Pulseaudio, I don't have any sound.

How can I fix this issue ?
Thanks !

(sorry if I forgot something, i'm new to Arch Linux)

todsmer

Member

Registered: 2021-05-11

Posts: 5

Re: Strange beep when audio play with pulseaudio

Hi, I have same issue. I'm on an old Asus C200 chromebook, and until several days ago, sound worked perfectly. However, during some recent upgrade, it stopped working at all - I had to install sof-firmware, and make a symbolic link, as described in the wiki article about Chrome OS devices.

It looks I have a SOF card too:

0 [PCH            ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel PCH
                      HDA Intel PCH at 0xd0914000 irq 91
1 [max98090       ]: SOF - sof-bytcht max98090
                      sof-bytcht max98090

However, I was able to reproduce this issue with just ALSA (max98090 is just my device, yours should be different):

$ speaker-test -D default:max98090 -c 2 

After several minutes, the same beep played for about a second or two, and I got an error in the console:

Write error: -5,Input/output error
xrun_recovery failed: -5,Input/output error
Transfer failed: Input/output error

Pulseaudio doesn't log anything during the issue, even if log level is set to highest. The only odd thing in pulseaudio logs is such, this happens on pulseaudio start:

May 10 13:17:18 chromebook pulseaudio[522]: ALSA woke us up to write new data to the device, but there was actually nothing to write.
May 10 13:17:18 chromebook pulseaudio[522]: Most likely this is a bug in the ALSA driver 'snd_soc_sst_cht_bsw_max98090_ti'. Please report this issue to the ALSA developers.
May 10 13:17:18 chromebook pulseaudio[522]: We were woken up with POLLOUT set -- however a subsequent snd_pcm_avail() returned 0 or another value < min_avail.

So maybe it's an issue with ALSA? I've tried to find any alsa logs, but wasn't able to find any, looks like everything is handled by pulseaudio.

todsmer

Member

Registered: 2021-05-11

Posts: 5

Re: Strange beep when audio play with pulseaudio

Downgrading linux kernel (firstly to previous version from Arch archive, then to linux-lts) fixed the issue for me.

I encountered low-pitch issues on the older kernel, but was able to fix these too. I did a lot of fiddling, so I'm not 100% sure what fixed this. Ultimately I removed all custom config files, so it's standard config, just had some missing packages (installed alsa-card-profiles and pulseaudio-alsa).