Choppy sound on Vortex 2 under Karmic

[daniq]

Binary package hint: pulseaudio

Sound in almost in every application is choppy + video playing speed is floating due to sound problems.
When sound output switched to another (USB-inserted) card - audio and video became OK.
This problem is obviously a pulseaudio problem, because playing some radio through Opera browser has no problems.
As I see pulse is not fully used because there is no Opera application in "Sound Preferences"->"Applications" tab when playing radio from browser. Switching to another soundcard in "Sound Preferences" does not affects Opera sound stream - it still outputted from Vortex2, but not from USB-card. And when I "pulseaudio --kill" Opera keeps playing.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
AudioDevicesInUse:
 USER PID ACCESS COMMAND
 /dev/snd/controlC0: dbaskakov 3445 F.... pulseaudio
 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p: dbaskakov 3506 F...m operapluginwrap
Card0.Amixer.info:
 Card hw:0 'au8830'/'Aureal Vortex au8830 at 0x90000000 irq 21'
   Mixer name : 'SigmaTel STAC9704'
   Components : 'AC97a:83847605'
   Controls : 45
   Simple ctrls : 33
Date: Thu Nov 5 15:40:26 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/pulseaudio
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release i386 (20091028.5)
Package: pulseaudio 1:0.9.19-0ubuntu4
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-14.48-generic
SourcePackage: pulseaudio
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-14-generic i686
mtime.conffile..etc.pulse.daemon.conf: 2009-11-05T12:23:37.042372

[daniq (gdaniq)]

Architecture: i386
AudioDevicesInUse:
 USER PID ACCESS COMMAND
 /dev/snd/controlC0: dbaskakov 2789 F.... pulseaudio
Card0.Amixer.info:
 Card hw:0 'au8830'/'Aureal Vortex au8830 at 0x90000000 irq 21'
   Mixer name : 'SigmaTel STAC9704'
   Components : 'AC97a:83847605'
   Controls : 45
   Simple ctrls : 33
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release i386 (20091028.5)
Package: pulseaudio 1:0.9.19-0ubuntu4
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-14.48-generic
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-14-generic i686
UserGroups: adm admin audio cdrom dialout dip fax fuse lpadmin plugdev sambashare tape video
mtime.conffile..etc.pulse.daemon.conf: 2009-11-05T12:23:37.042372

[daniq (gdaniq)]

Here is pulseaudio log of playing video in Totem with choppy sound and floating sound)

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

You actually need to disable autospawn as outlined at
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio/Log

[daniq (gdaniq)]

OK, I disabled it. But this affects only autorestart pulse, how it relates to my problem?

[daniq (gdaniq)]

Here is the new log. I simply play, wait a bit and stop video in Totem but there are constant rewinds in log.

[hyper_sonic (hyper-sonic)]

Yes, I have this bug too. I posted this bug-report to alsa-project bug-tracker, but developer say this pulseaudio problem:"
This does not look like driver underrun

0 bytes in queue mean pa_memblockq_is_readable() return FALSE

It look like PA server did not receive enough data from the PA client

Have you ask PA developer why there is "0 bytes in queue" ?

    if (pa_memblockq_is_readable(s->memblockq))
        s->is_underrun = FALSE;
    else {
        if (!s->is_underrun)
            pa_log_debug("Underrun on '%s', %lu bytes in queue.", pa_strnull(pa_proplist_gets(i->proplist, PA_PROP_MEDIA_NAME)), (unsigned long) pa_memblockq_get_length(s->memblockq));

D: protocol-native.c: Underrun on 'Mixadance255_2', 0 bytes in queue.
D: protocol-native.c: Requesting rewind due to end of underrun.
D: alsa-sink.c: Requested to rewind 28996 bytes.
D: alsa-sink.c: Limited to 17748 bytes.
D: alsa-sink.c: before: 4437
D: alsa-sink.c: after: 4437
D: alsa-sink.c: Rewound 17748 bytes.
D: sink.c: Processing rewind...
D: sink-input.c: Have to rewind 17748 bytes on render memblockq.
D: source.c: Processing rewind...
"

[hyper_sonic (hyper-sonic)]

URL to this bug on alsa bug-tracker: https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug/view.php?id=4776

[IsTI37 (logistikdesign)]

This bug gets annoying, anyone got a fix ?

I've put my logs.

[IsTI37 (logistikdesign)]

Temporary solution :
Use audacious and switch the output to OSS.
The sound will be lower in quality but it won't be choppy.

[Raymond (superquad-vortex2)]

Refer to log in #13

I: alsa-sink.c: Using 16.0 fragments of size 4096 bytes (23.22ms), buffer size is 65536 bytes (371.52ms)
I: alsa-sink.c: Time scheduling watermark is 20.00ms

watermark 20ms is not enough since au88x0 has 4 hardware subbuffers

you cannot let PA sleep 348ms and wakeup 20.00ms before the buffer is empty, most likely PA have to wakeup 69ms when there is about 3 periods left in the buffer

can you increase initial watermark to 69ms when using 16 period x period_size 1024 ?

or try using 2 fragments of size 4096 bytes which work quite well in Fedora 10 using PA 0.9.13

[Andy Whitcroft (apw)]

Adding a pulseaudio task as this is looking likely an issue there, and indeed the patch above is for pulseaudio.

[Andy Whitcroft (apw)]

Please reopen the kernel task if this turns out not to be a pulseaudio issue.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Thank you for reporting this bug to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 9.10 (karmic) reached end-of-life on April 30, 2011.

See this document for currently supported Ubuntu releases:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

Please upgrade to the latest version and re-test.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

The attachment "Patch which call pa_alsa_dump when alsa-sink ans alsa-source underrun" seems to be a patch. If it isn't, please remove the "patch" flag from the attachment, remove the "patch" tag, and if you are a member of the ~ubuntu-reviewers, unsubscribe the team.

[This is an automated message performed by a Launchpad user owned by ~brian-murray, for any issues please contact him.]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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