Investigating why my audio was occasionally choppy (which was perfect in 11.0), I drilled down thru the yast2 hardware config and choose “Edit” to see the settings on my soundcard (SB Audigy2 ZS).
To my surprise, the various parameters listed (alloc seq ports, max voices, sample buffer size, etc) had no values entered. Or, at least I see no values in the value column. Is this to allow the card to fall to default values? or should I have values there?
OS11.1/KDE4.1.3 alsa, Audigy2ZS… no difference pulseaudio enabled/disabled but it is installed.
My guess is that this is the way it is supposed to be. It is a generic field, that one can tune for different cards.
Sometimes adjusting the buffer size helps for choppy audio. But other times choppy audio is an interrupt problem, in which case it is much more difficult to solve.
KDE3 has a place where one can adjust the buffer size (as do some multimedia apps) and in the case of KDE3 (and those apps) sometimes one can address choppy audio by increasing the buffer size.
I do not know what those fields (that you mention) in YaST > Hardware > Sound do, and so if you do decide to play with them, I would make careful note as to what the settings are now, so you can restore them afterward if need be.
Just a further note, you state your sound was fine in 11.0, but you do not mention the desktop you were using in 11.0.
Pulse Audio is an extra layer between the Linux alsa driver and the desktop, and that could also be a cause for your problem. KDE3 uses pulse far less extensively than KDE4.
the previous 11.0 install was KDE4.1.3 also, and since you jogged my memory i do recall on install some problems which disappeared after i changed from the default gstreamer backend to xine (this was in 4.0.4 days).
additional info:
as per the audio troubleshooting webpage i ran thru the basic steps and from cli the speaker-test was fine. Started yast2 and hit Test sound and got nothing, deleted the card reconfigured the new entry (which btw was sensed a bit differently, a Audigy2Platinum instead of Audigy2ZS) hit the test button again… still nothing. Went back to cli and did alsaconf with no problems. Installed paprefs and followed the information on Pulseaudio webpage PulseAudio - openSUSE . Everything seems to check out fine… but,
1> the Test button in yast2 still doesn’t make a peep, though all available file formats like wav, ogg, mp3, etc. can be heard.
2> Still having the occassional choppiness especially starting mp3’s and videos. It does seem less noticiable now, but it’s far from fixed.
I am optimistic about pulse and hope that some suggestion here might shed some light on the problem, but I’ll probably take pulseaudio out of the picture if no viable solutions present themselves.
I also noticed that my KDE 3.5.10 login sound was choppy on 11.1. I don’t know precisely what to attribute it to and couldn’t really complain because I didn’t know whether it was simply the fact that I was running OpenSUSE in VirtualBox.
But the KDE sounds play fine when testing them in KControl. For all I know it’s that Beagle indexing during startup that is hogging the resources. Perhaps going through PulseAudio rather than Alsa direct like in the past makes it more finicky if other processes are usurping high cpu cycles (like Beagle would do)?
I recall from the past on 10.2 and 10.3 that YaST Soundcard configuration would populate that screen you’re talking about with something default in every box. Perhaps there’s some bug preventing that now, or some PulseAudio interference?
I’ve yet to boot up the Live cd on my real system, having so much fun playing with RC1 in VirtualBox. It’ll be interesting to see if the devs have fixed the problem of needing to toggle the Audigy 2 ZS Digital/Analog output switch to get audio. Pre-PulseAudio this wasn’t necessary, but on any distro I’ve seen (like Ubuntu, Mandriva, etc) lately that uses PulseAudio, I’ve needed to play with that in KMix or Gnome Volume to get my Audigy 2 ZS to make its sounds over my analog 2.1 speakers.
after further study, oldcpu was on the nose about lack of values in the Sound/Edit/AdvancedSettings yast2 settings. No values seem to be no “additional” settings to the base alsafirmware/conf chosen values. good advice there, oldcpu.
I would be interested to know if other users can actually get a Test Sound output from the yast2 Sound module since mine doesn’t do anything but sound is available.
Observations… the paprefs app is well done but some settings in the app can’t seem to be done as user… and there is a hidden .pulse-cookie generated in the root directory (/home for a user) I suspect containing that data. I’m curious if the pulseaudio I’ve now enabled, actually improves simultaneous audio output requests from different applications. Also, first impression is that the choppiness is confined to the “beginning” of a audio output and disappears after a few seconds, which as oldcpu pointed out, may have something to do with buffer size or the signal processing framework. In addition the modifications to the conf file for pulse mentioned in the opensuse pulseaudio webpage seem to been included already as my install has those changes already.
pulseaudio does seem to be the culprit for the stutter/choppiness as eliminating all pulse components and installing esound has stopped that situation, have a problem with some notification sounds in kde3 Konversation but I’m not sure that’s related.
Sidebar, trying different file formats like wav and ogg after dispensing with pulse yielded poor results. These were played by realplayer instead and switching the file association in kde4 to mplayer fixed that.