mpg123 breaking up

When I invoke

mpg123 xxx.mp3

all I get is clicks and hums. But if I start pavucontrol without changing anything in it the file plays just fine. If I close pavucontrol while it’s playing it continues to play normally. But the next time without pavucontrol I get the clicks and hums again.

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Which desktop environment? Is pulseaudio running when you first try to use mpg123?

ps -A|grep pulse

Normally, I’d expect it to be active (but I’m using KDE where it is started at login). My thoughts were perhaps that by starting pavucontrol, pulseaudio is then started in your case?

If it isn’t active, it can be started manually with

pulseaudio -D

Desktop is Xfce. Pulseaudio is running.

:~> ps -A|grep pulse
 1755 ?        00:00:13 panel-6-pulseau
 1777 ?        00:01:12 pulseaudio

Hmmm…which audio chipset/driver is in here? I’m wondering if “power saving” is impacting somehow?

inxi -Axx

or

/usr/sbin/hwinfo --sound

FWIW, you can check the module parameters (as root) with

systool -vm <module_name>

Thank you for the suggestions. I give up. It’s simpler to create a bash file starting pavucontrol and then running mpg123.

Fair enough - that’s the pragmatic option. However, it would have been interesting to see if driver power management was at play, as we could have perhaps taken steps to inhibit it. :slight_smile:

FWIW, I stumbled over an old Mac thread describing similar behaviour, and the quirky workaround suggested was to play a silent mp3 file continuously in the background to keep the audio system awake! :smiley: