When I boot into openSUSE 12.1 KDE, sound intitially works sort of… (get intro sounds, can play mp3s, etc.). However, the longer I use the sound, the greater the chance that it just dies (stops playing).
In the meantime, anything that play sound gets sound that crackles, pops, or choppy sounds. If I move the mouse around, especially if it seems graphic intensive (playing videos in a broswer), the problem gets worse (more crackling noises). The more taxing it appears to be, the more likely it is that the sound will just die altogether until I reboot. For some reason the videos at Bloomberg - Business, Financial & Economic News, Stock Quotes seem especially bad for it (my sound normally goes dead in under 45 seconds and won’t work until reboot).
- Both my desktop running openSUSE and my laptop (still running the Ubuntu 12.04 I used to have on my desktop also) have the same crackling problem.
Troubleshooting so far (done in Ubuntu 12.04 – not sure what else to try in openSUSE):
A friend of mine who knows linux well tried to solve it for me without any luck. He took pulseaudio out of the equation, but still had the problem just using AlSA. Among the many things he tried was adjusting the latency, but that didn’t help either.
I’ve also tried things like adjusting the USB device settings in the config file from -2 to -1 so that it will use my USB sound and I also commented out the lines that would stop that. These don’t do anything. (That really seems like it’s for someone who is getting no sound at all, so it’s not surprising this won’t work.)
My friend’s laptop running his Archlinux could play my Bose USB speakers without any problems.
I recently used a DVD to boot into Ubuntu Studio 12.04 (because it uses a live audio kernel) and this happened:
I got perfect sound for a minute or two
When I started moving windows around while sound was playing, the sound died again.
Perhaps more interesting:
There is a headphone out jack on the Bose system. When I use it, the audio is perfect for all applications (even the deadly bloomberg.com videos with .avi playing at the same time and moving around windows).
Also, there is an audio-in jack on the Bose system. I can use a male-to-male mini jack to go from my soundcard’s output to the Bose input and then all sound works perfectly.
-However, it still requires the Bose to be plugged in to USB, otherwise I lose all sound.
-Note: this does NOT work in my current install of openSUSE 12.1 – I’m guessing this might be because I’ve had the onboard sound card disabled through CMOS since before I installed openSUSE.
Any thoughts?
Any suggestions for trouble shooting? (Or any suggestions for somewhere else to post to solve this?)
Any logs or other files I can provide to help someone help me work this out?
Your help is much appreciated!
Rick
BTW: I sometimes get people posting responses like “My Bose USB system works great with Ubuntu 12.04,” without any more details. Is there anything I should ask such people to narrow down my problem? (It’s kind of annoying to hear such a response because it doesn’t help solve my problem.)
When I boot into openSUSE 12.1 KDE, sound intitially works sort of… (get intro sounds, can play mp3s, etc.). However, the longer I use the sound, the greater the chance that it just dies (stops playing).
In the meantime, anything that play sound gets sound that crackles, pops, or choppy sounds. If I move the mouse around, especially if it seems graphic intensive (playing videos in a broswer), the problem gets worse (more crackling noises). The more taxing it appears to be, the more likely it is that the sound will just die altogether until I reboot.
I don’t have a definitive answer here, but I wonder whether this is a possible shared interrupt issue, or similar? (I used to experience low level audio noise with an old laptop where my sound and graphics driver were using the same interrupt. I never actually completely solved it, as interrupts assignment is handled by the kernel, but IIRC, there was a sound driver option that could reduce the problem with buffering).
In this user’s case, it was found that using the nvidia graphics driver caused issues with sound, which disappeared when the nouveau driver was used instead.
Another thought I had, is that if you have intel CPUs, dynamic frequency scaling (power management) may be at play with some of the noise you experience. You may wish to try controlling this with the help of this utility:
Thanks for these leads; I’ll take a look at them. I do have an nvidia graphics card, so it looks somewhat promising. However, I’ve avoided installing the nVidia proprietary drivers because they take away my “rotate” option (it just disappears) and I use both of my monitors in portrait mode.
As a quick test, start up in safe mode, (don’t worry about the graphics performance and resolution), then see if the audio problem persists. At least that will confirm if the nvidia driver is the cause.
I loaded into safemode and ran tons of video with audio and straight audio at the same time. It got choppy at times (the computer was clearly being taxed, the video would slow down and such, but there was not the same crackling as before (not the static element I had heard before with popping, just choppiness). I thought, That’s it! However, it wasn’t the whole story.
I then loaded into normal mode. Same thing (many videos with audio worked successfully) except the added crackling and popping (static type this time). Still, no matter how many I ran at once, it didn’t break like before (before it would break with 1-2 videos–especially if they were from bloomberg.com). This time they didn’t (and when I wasn’t in safe mode, they even seemed less choppy).
But there was an added factor. Since my last posts, I had flashed a bios update to my motherboard (it had probably been at least a couple of years since I had updated it and I did it as part of my troubleshooting to install a new TV card, which I had thought I’d be restricted to using in my windows xp boot because of my linux sound issues). So… I suspect there was something in the bios update that helped the sound situation. The other thing I did (which I doubt affected it) was I enabled the nVidia onboard HD sound again (but to my knowledge I didn’t use it at all today, I was using the USB Bose).
Now, I just need to get rid of the crackling and popping (but at least the sound doesn’t die). I’m guessing that’s from the nVidia issue you mentioned?
I already am using the nouveau driver. I stuck with it because in the past when I updated to the nVidia driver it wouldn’t rotate my screens, so I never put it on my openSUSE install. Any other thoughts? Could it be something with nVidia nForce drivers or could the newest nVidia video driver for my 8600 GT solve the issue?
