Ubuntu Audio doesn't work on snowball

[Lee Jones]

It is currently not possible to play sound files on Snowball.

[Lee Jones (lag)]

This is a retro-bug report.

Status to date:

[Lee Jones (lag)]

 * Sound can be achieved by playing a native 48000Hz file directly through ALSA:
    * aplay -Dhw:0,1 48khz.wav

 * Gstreamer can also be used to play MP3s:
    * gst-launch-0.10 playbin audiosink="alsasink device=hw:0,1" uri=file://filename

 * Once /etc/asound.conf has been set up in the following way:
    pcm.!default {
        type hw
        card 0
        device 1
    }
    * Then we can drop the device specification

 * With the correct UDEV and Pulse profiles Ubuntu plays sound natively
   * The final piece of the puzzle is to push these changes into a suitable repo

[Riku Voipio (riku-voipio)]

As tested with the 12.02 RC2 images, audio works from command line:

 aplay -Dhw:0,1 /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Side_Left.wav

but is heavily distorted in pulseaudio. For example try speaker tests in gnome sound settings.

Switching pulseaudio from timer based scheduling to interrupt based fixed the choppiness for me:

17:35 < suihkulokki> in /etc/pulse/default.pa:
17:35 < suihkulokki> -load-module module-udev-detect
17:35 < suihkulokki> +load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

 it is apparently considered a bug in the alsa driver if pulseaudio cannot use timer scheduling, and we probably shouldn't change the default for all boards.

[Ricardo Salveti (rsalveti)]

Moving to 12.03 until this is properly fixed on Ubuntu (as I'd prefer to fix the issue properly instead of enabling the work around that would also affect the other boards).

[Thomas Espersson (espersson)]

New bug created to track the problem with choppy playback:

"Choppy playback on Snowball through pulseaudio"
https://bugs.launchpad.net/igloocommunity/+bug/939593

[Anmar Oueja (anmar)]

Ricardo: Can you please mark this as fixed releaesd and use bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/linaro-ubuntu/+bug/939593 instead.

[Ricardo Salveti (rsalveti)]

Closing and tracking the other issue on bug #939593.