Hello!
Yesterday, after installing lots of updates on my Tumbleweed system, I noticed that there was a problem with audio playback: no matter what kind of audio I am playing (YouTube videos via Firefox, music via VLC or Elisa, Spotify music via the web app…), the playback is often choppy, with very frequent clicks and pops, and sometimes, for a fraction of a second, a part of - for example - a song is reproduced again, overlapping the part that is being played at the moment. I think I haven’t explained myself very clearly, so here’s an example: I have a song that is 2 minutes long, and when the playback is at 0:15, amidst all the clicks & pops, I can hear short fragments of past parts of the songs (for example, short pieces of the song that belong to the 2-3 preceding seconds).
This problem is quite annoying since it basically kills audio playback on my system. Can you help me please? If you need some logs, just tell me, I’ll gladly provide them.
Thank you in advance!
ArchLinux have a wiki with suggestions: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Troubleshooting#Glitches.2C_skips_or_crackling
you could try those … such as turn off timer-based scheduling by adding tsched=0 in /etc/pulse/default.pa (see the wiki) and restarting pulse audio. There are other suggestions there as well, but they starting getting rather specific.
I read of another case where a user who installed an additional package (pulseaudio-equalizer-ladspa), had to replace it by pulseaudio-equalizer, then rebooting and pulseaudio issues were then gone since then for them. But that may not be relevant to your PC.
I have also read of users editing /etc/pulse/daemon.conf, changing
; realtime-scheduling = yes
to
realtime-scheduling = no
and restarting pulse. But that also may not be relevant to your PC’s issue.
The above is very speculative by myself. Give each a try and if it does not work, restore to how it was before.
Hello, thanks for the tips, unfortunately none of them solved my issue; however, I’ve noticed something interesting & weird at the same time: 90% of the skips/pops/clicks in the playback happen when there is some interaction between me and my PC, and especially when I interact with my desktop environment (KDE)! For example, actions like switching workspaces, minimizing windows, hovering with the mouse on the battery icon in KDE’s panel (so that the battery percentage and lifetime appear on screen), opening KDE’s app menu, etc., all cause playback stutters and clicks/pops.
Don’t know…maybe run top and see if you have some program hogging the CPU
Ok, check out para-3.9 here (Pops when starting and stopping playback):
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Troubleshooting#Pops_when_starting_and_stopping_playback
Give that a try, being certain to restart pulse audio (easiest way is to reboot) after applying change.
Again - speculation on my part as I do not have this problem.
Nothing solved my problem… One intersting thing is that these pops and cracks are present only when using Wayland. If I switch to Plasma on Xorg, audio playback is perfect! I wonder what package update introduced this bug… (as I’ve already wrote in the first post, this problem has only been present since ~1 week, only on Wayland)
No problems with GNOME/Wayland using Firefox or Quod Libet.
Tumbleweed 20190730