glitchy (pulsing) sound on Alienware box, 11.10

[David Harmon]

This bug has persisted and occasionally recurred from 10.04 on, and it's still there in 11.10.

The problem is a periodic cut-out of the sound, so it sounds like it's pulsing with a beat between 1 and 2 per second.

My ALSA information is at http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=63bdde325703c11f4858432f559ecd55d5d93e70 .

On the "Sound Preferences" dialog, I have three hardware devices available, most of them don't work at all, but "Internal Audio"'s Surround 4.1 and Surround 5.1 give audio with the pulsing, which even affects its speaker test. Interestingly, the "System Test" program plays its annoying tone without the ululation.

I tried installing the ALSA Developer's releases on 10.10, I'll try again here, but I was greeted after my upgrade by the cutout affecting the startup sound.

[David Harmon (dmh-phoenix)]

Adding the ALSA-dev ppa manually resulted in no upgrades after a reload. Trying to do it from the command line gave me:

  File "/usr/bin/add-apt-repository", line 88, in <module>
    ppa_info = get_ppa_info_from_lp(user, ppa_name)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/softwareproperties/ppa.py", line 83, in get_ppa_info_from_lp
    return json.loads(lp_page)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/__init__.py", line 326, in loads
    return _default_decoder.decode(s)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/decoder.py", line 366, in decode
    obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/decoder.py", line 384, in raw_decode
    raise ValueError("No JSON object could be decoded")
ValueError: No JSON object could be decoded

[David Harmon (dmh-phoenix)]

OK, I got the PPA installed, byut trying to get the modules got:

E: Unable to locate package linux-alsa-driver-modules-3.0.0-20-generic
E: Couldn't find any package by regex 'linux-alsa-driver-modules-3.0.0-20-generic'

looking in Synaptic, I see that the latest version is 3.0.0.15-generic, Trying to install that wants to install the matching linux-image. I'm guessing that's a downgrade I shouldn't do?

[David Harmon (dmh-phoenix)]

In desperation, I unstalled the earlier linux image, and set GRUB to boot from it... no change. Startup sound is still glitched.

[David Harmon (dmh-phoenix)]

More information: After the previous experiments (but going back to 3.0.0-20 kernel), I have ululating sound in Firefox (e.g., Youtube) but not smplayer or MineCraft. Banshee dies on startup in a flurry of error messages.

[David Harmon (dmh-phoenix)]

(That is, I have *no* sound in smplayer or Minecraft (which is Java-based).

[David Harmon (dmh-phoenix)]

11.10 promptly *stopped* producing any sound at all. I tried replacing the upgrade with a fresh install, to no avail. After about the 6th or 8th popup "suggestion", I upgraded to 12.01, and now it's back to glitchy sound with the same settings. (At least the sound-settings panel is somewhat improved.) Should I redo the ALSA information?

[David Harmon (dmh-phoenix)]

I just read https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-driver/+bug/1007783 and tried disabling Pulseaudio with Michael Lazarev's method:

touch ~/.pulse-a11y-nostart
echo autospawn = no|tee -a ~/.pulse/client.conf
killall pulseaudio

That got me no sound at all, in smplayer, banshee, or minecraft.

I will now revert that and try the bit from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Audio/PositionReporting :

>If this affects your HDA Intel sound card, there are two methods the driver can read the position reports. You can test the two >different methods by editing the /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf file, and add either

>options snd-hda-intel position_fix=1

[David Harmon (dmh-phoenix)]

Nope, didn't fix anything. I'm stumped again.

[David Harmon (dmh-phoenix)]

I tried installing pavucontrol, which doesn't seem to change anything. I'm now using"ubuntu-bug audio", which is producing a pulseaudio bug, #Bug #1013445.

[David Harmon (dmh-phoenix)]

Aha!: I tried "Turning off PulseAudio timer scheduling" from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Audio/PositionReporting . Now sound appears normal in all three programs mentioned.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[hornetster (hornetster)]

Believe I have the same problem - 12.04 x64.
Sound is pulsing media apps (Have tried VLS/Kaffeine/Rhythmbox).
Has only been happening for the last couple of days - was fine before.
Have tried the fix suggested (Turning off PulseAudio timer scheduling).
REALLY annoying - am going back to Suse until this is fixed.

[ubuLinux (relstak)]

Same issue here, this effects *all* streaming video and audio, but also from files played locally. I noticed also that when the choppiness occurs the whole UI is affected meaning the responsiveness drops. If I am typing the typing is delayed by a second, if I am moving windows there is also a delay.
I was running the resource monitor and noticed that whenever choppiness occurs ALL CPU cores activity dips for a sec and then goes back up. It's as if the entire system just goes into "wait" state or something.
I have a core i7 980X with 6GB of ram so this is definitely NOT a resource issue. I have an ATI radeon 5870

This also started happening recently, about 2 weeks ago after an update. Also noticing that the delay in typing and responsiveness is present even when there is no video or audio playing.

I've tried above solutions but no change:
- Turning off PulseAudio timer scheduling
- Setting also mixer automute to disabled

I've also tried loading previous kernel versions (about 3 versions back) but no change.
Please fix! Thank you!

[Michael Andersen (mpandersen)]

I am also getting this on Precise: audio looping and little black holes in responsiveness.

Like with ubuLinux above, I get UI lockups for a split second and my PC is an i7 3930K with 32G of RAM and the OS installed on SSD's so it is definitely _not_ a lack of available resources.

I have also tried turning off the PulseAudio timer scheduling to no avail, although now the loops in audio are shorter and slightly less frequent - perhaps there are multiple bugs with similar symptoms in play.

Perhaps this bug is related to bug #751298, bug #1045771 and/or bug #1019693. Let me know if I can give any hardware info or logs.

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

This release of Ubuntu is no longer receiving maintenance updates. If this is still an issue on a maintained version of Ubuntu please let us know.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for alsa-driver (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]