opensuse 12.1 : The sound is chopped in KDE, YaST sound test is perfect

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1

Hello,

On a small Acer Aspire One, the sound is chopped when I’m in KDE, while the test sound in Yast works perfectly.

The sound card is well recognized (intel HDA), the ALC272 codec is loaded, at ALSA level everything is perfect (all connectors work, micro etc …)
All applications are concerned : Amarok, Kaffeine, VLC, Web Streaming, KDE itself (event sounds) etc … The sound is played intermittently, as if one was covering and uncovering its ears every second by listening to music.
I read dozens of articles and posts on the subject (sound problems), but all are related to sound cards not recognized, no sound at all, bad codec loading, rights issues etc … nothing about chopped sound or intermittent playback.

It is a completly brand new openSuSE 12.1 installation, with only default repos, packman and libdvdcss. There is no other issue.
The machine is not so powerfull : a slow intel ATOM proc, 1Gb RAm and a 60Gb SSD disk. Intel GMA 500 (poulsbo) as graphic card.

I guess it is a problem related to the sound system of KDE (Phonon), but I do not know where to start looking at :
I have suspected that this could be related to the really poor support of the GMA 500 Graphic chipset (no accelaration etc) but even disabling desktop effects the problem persists.
I have deactivated almost everything that is running in background or accessing disk (killed packagekit, nepomuk etc…) - no single change !

I am lost in blue, does anyone has an idea, I would like to avoid leaving this machine running WinXP ?

thank you

2

Just a quick search found a couple of suggestions. One was to add in the following line to your config file: /etc/modprobe.d/00-system.conf

options snd-hda-intel power_save=0

Further, I have seen suggestions to just disable PulseAudio. You can use my Start bash script to do that among other things:

S.T.A.R.T. - SuSE Terminal Audio Reporting Tool - Version 1.11 - Blogs - openSUSE Forums

There is also a suggest to edit and add the following line: Add the this line to your ~/.bashrc

export KMIX_PULSEAUDIO_DISABLE=1

See if anything here is helpful to you. I do not suggest to uninstall PulseAudio, but just to disable it.

Thank You,

3

You could take a look here to see if the suggestions there help: choppy/skipping sound in pulse

4

:slight_smile: MANY THANKS !

Sorry for the late answer and testing.
Everything is working now.
I tested sequentially all your advices :
Adding in either /etc/modprobe.d/00-system.conf, /etc/modprobe.d/50-sound.conf or even /etc/modprobe.d/99-local.conf :

options snd-hda-intel power_save=0

Didn’t help at all

Adding :

export KMIX_PULSEAUDIO_DISABLE=1

in ~/.bashrc didn’t help either.

I went then to S.T.A.R.T. - SuSE Terminal Audio Reporting Tool - Version 1.11 - Blogs - openSUSE Forums :

Disabling PulseAudio with the S.T.A.R.T. script did the job, the sound was smooth again in all applications, but didn’t completely pleased me because I had to deactivate a component.

I re-enabled PulsAudio and there choppy/skipping sound in pulse

the advice was to change the line in /etc/pulse/default.pa :

load-module module-udev-detect

by

load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

That worked perfectly. Now PulseAudio is running and the sound is perfect !

Again thanks.
Georges

5

That’s great news … Glad sound is better now.

Its a bit disappointing to read pulse still has glitches like this. I like the features of pulse that I have on my PC, but I note some users have hardware that still seems to struggle with pulse, and I hope sometime in the near future the developers (?) [or is it the packagers ? ] manage to package pulse in a way such that these sort of trial and error to discover fixes are not needed.