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arew264

Member

From: Friendswood, Texas, US

Registered: 2006-07-01

Posts: 394

Website

Pulse Audio

I recently tried to switch to PulseAudio on my laptop. ALSA was glitching, and every so often, sound would just stop until I killed all sound-using applications (which were mostly frozen). It was pretty irritating.
Anyway, I switched to PulseAudio, and it did work, and I actually liked it better than ALSA, but it skipped. I have a 2GHz single core processor on my laptop, and Pulse ate a good bit of CPU when anything was playing. DVD's with high bitrate menu music that played fine under ALSA skipped majorly under Pulse. I lowered the default fragment size to 5ms, and that made the skipping less evident, but it was still there.
Did I do something wrong? I added my user to the pulse-rt group, and I followed the Wiki page the whole way through.

This is kind of a postmortem analysis because I removed and reinstalled all ALSA-related packages, which fixed the ALSA glitch, but given that Pulse seems to be gaining popularity in the linux world, was it skippy on my computer because I have a bad computer or because I configured something incorrectly? I suspect it's the former, but I like Pulse enough that if it's the latter, I'd like to try and get it running again.

Last edited by arew264 (2009-05-30 04:33:25)

ngoonee

Forum Fellow

From: Between Thailand and Singapore

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 7,356

Re: Pulse Audio

Simply disable glitch-free. Glitch-free has been reported to be buggy because of weird alsa drivers for intel HDA, which I'm pretty sure you're using on your laptop.

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arew264

Member

From: Friendswood, Texas, US

Registered: 2006-07-01

Posts: 394

Website

Re: Pulse Audio

Nope, I've got an AMD chipset... let me get the exact line from lspci...

ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 02)

UPDATE:
Augh, ALSA is still broken. I can't seem to find any other cases of this, so I guess I'll go back to Pulse...

Last edited by arew264 (2009-05-30 22:05:40)