Sound works for a while then sounds like a robot

English Hardware
#1

Hi. on openSUSE Tumbleweed with kernel 6.4.2 on a dell inspiron 5400 laptop. Most of the time when i run with this kernel, after a long time, the sound sounds distorted and robot-like. I have to turn off the sound card and turn it on again.

Anyone else having issues with this? Or is it just pipewire?

This does not happen on my Ubuntu 22.04 install.

#2

Strange. Maybe provide some specs related to audio usage …

I have a Dell Latitude 5500 - no audio issues here:

Operating System: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20230713
KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.6
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.108.0
Qt Version: 5.15.10
Kernel Version: 6.4.2-1-default (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: X11
Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i5-8365U CPU @ 1.60GHz
Memory: 15.4 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: Mesa Intel® UHD Graphics 620
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP High Definition Audio Controller (rev 30) (prog-if 80)
#3

Does this tend to occur only when the system is running at heavy loads, or all the time? Any particular type of work/gaming tasks that might exacerbate this issue?

Machine and Audio hardware information?

inxi -Aa

Just in case this Manjaro thread is of value here:

(It had some interesting ideas around prioritization, but not sure if it will help here.)

Reporting pipewire bugs:

#4

Its not even heavy loads. The laptop has 8gb ram, and it seems to occur when i play sound for a while.

My hardware info is:
Audio:
Device-1: Intel Ice Lake-LP Smart Sound Audio vendor: Dell
driver: sof-audio-pci-intel-icl
alternate: snd_hda_intel,snd_sof_pci_intel_icl bus-ID: 00:1f.3
chip-ID: 8086:34c8 class-ID: 0401
API: ALSA v: k6.4.2-1-default status: kernel-api with: aoss
type: oss-emulator tools: alsactl,alsamixer,amixer
Server-1: PipeWire v: 0.3.72 status: active with: 1: pipewire-pulse
status: active 2: wireplumber status: active 3: pipewire-alsa type: plugin
tools: pactl,pw-cat,pw-cli,wpctl

#5

It also happens sometimes when i rewind stuff.

#6

Ok, any errors reported?

journalctl --user -fu pipewire

Would you describe it as audio stutter? Does it get worse if moving windows around, playing video, starting large applications etc?

#7

No, strangely no errors. Its not audio stutter, any time i boot up my laptop, after approx 20 minutes or so most of the time any media i play sounds like a robot.

#8

Restarting pipewire makes it sound normal.

#9

@deano_ferrari For 5 or so minutes then sounds distorted like a robot again. :person_facepalming: :person_facepalming: :person_facepalming: :person_facepalming:

#10

@Basilcat: I would submit a bug report for this.

#11

It also seems as if kernel-firmware sound has something to do with this as nothing pipewire like was updated. Should i file a bug about that package on bugzilla?

#12

I’m really not sure (based on the information posted so far) as to where the problem lays. What you could do as a test is to play a long sound track using ‘aplay’ (CLI player for ALSA). That might help determine if the issue is happening down at the ALSA layer (or if it only occurs with pipewire streaming in the mix).

aplay /path/to/a/sound/file

This will play even when pipewire is stopped, which you could do with

systemctl --user stop pipewire.{socket,service}