Frequently stutters/pops with hda_intel

[Chris Halse Rogers]

Binary package hint: pulseaudio

pulseaudio:
  Installed: 0.9.13-2ubuntu1

Pulseaudio 0.9.13 has serious regressions on my hda_intel (codec: Realtek ALC660) laptop - there are frequent pops in pulseaudio playback, even under minimal or no CPU or IO load. These do not occur with my USB speakers.

This was originally filed against the version of pulseaudio in Luke's PPA for Intrepid testing, but it persists in Jaunty.

[Luke Yelavich (themuso)]

Can you give any log output as to whats going on with your hda soundcard?

[Chris Halse Rogers (raof)]

Here's details of my soundcard setup, as provided by the alsa-info script: http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=dad977e638055d5d42e035221185e6c519cd3990

Also attached is a log of pulseaudio -vvv, with Banshee playing a song and no other CPU or I/O load - notice the cluster of buffer underruns near the end.

[Chris Halse Rogers (raof)]

And here's dmesg, in case it's useful

[Luke Yelavich (themuso)]

Chris, I was reading the changelog for the latest 2.6.27 kernel thats been uploaded to intrepid, and I think I remember seeing fixes for your codec in there. Could you try the latest kernel when you get a chance, to see if that solves anything?

Thanks.

[Chris Halse Rogers (raof)]

Yeah, I saw that changelog with some ALSA fixes.

Sadly, they don't seem to fix this; I'm still seeing underruns under minimal load.

I'll try pulling alsa-driver git next.

[Luke Yelavich (themuso)]

Please look out for an update to pulseaudio from my PPA, which hopefully addresses this issue. Turns out I wasn't building against policykit, so hopefully that will make a difference.

Thanks

Luke

[Chris Halse Rogers (raof)]

Tried the latest packages (0.9.12 ~ppa5). The same behaviour occurs.

This is using alsa-driver 1.0.18rc3 and libasound2 1.0.17a-0ubuntu2~ppa1

Some further observations:
* It seems like this might be codec specific - don't ask me how. I have a bunch of songs in wavpack format which exhibit underruns frequently, whereas I don't seem to get the same frequency of underruns with mp3s.

* The "I: alsa-sink: buffer-underrun" messages only appear when there's a pavucontrol client connected, although the audio glitches occur regardless, so it seems that pavucontrol is making pulseaudio report more underruns, not actually generating more underruns.

New logfile attached.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

It's worth inquiring if this symptom is reproducible in current jaunty with today's pa update.

[Chris Halse Rogers (raof)]

Seems like this has been fixed in 9.04 in the past couple of weeks