Ubuntu
alsa-plugins package

  1. Bug #485488
  2. Comment #0

Comment 0 for bug 485488

Revision history for this message
Vadim Peretokin (vperetokin) wrote : Game that uses ALSA's sound crackles/dies quickly in Karmic

Binary package hint: pulseaudio

I'm assuming that ubuntu-bug adds all the technical information about my system, so I'll skip on that.

In short, on Jaunty - sound from game was fine on default settings.

On Karmic - sound 'crackles' at first, and then eventually just dies. No sound coming from game at all. Checking pavucontrol, it's not emitting any sound. Nothing changed with the game. The game will also hang on exit until I kill the games output stream in pavucontrol. ("the hang on exit is caused by snd_pcm_writei hanging (gets stuck in a blocking poll in libasound)")

Now, nobody really knows what's going on, so I'll just dump all that I know at first.

The problem is somewhere in the alsa<->PA layer.

Changing the games sound buffer to be 4096 fixed the problem for me ("what changes is that snd_pcm_hw_params_set_buffer_size_near gets passed a larger value")

It's affecting certain HDA Intel sound chipsets (not all HDA intel).

Mangler project says that the default latency changed: http://www.mangler.org/2009/10/two-major-fixes-today/

There are many people on the games forum with this issue, although I can't give direct links as its in closed beta. But here are various things people have posted, that worked for some, and not for others:

http://paste.pocoo.org/show/151760/
http://paste.pocoo.org/show/151762/

Ubuntu forums thread regarding sound: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1309656

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Card0.Amixer.info:
 Card hw:0 'Intel'/'HDA Intel at 0xf8400000 irq 20'
   Mixer name : 'Realtek ALC268'
   Components : 'HDA:10ec0268,14c00025,00100003 HDA:10573055,10573055,00100700'
   Controls : 15
   Simple ctrls : 12
Card1.Amixer.info:
 Card hw:1 'Audio'/'Plantronics Wireless Audio Plantronics Wireless Audio at usb-0000:00:1d.0-1, fu'
   Mixer name : 'USB Mixer'
   Components : 'USB047f:d955'
   Controls : 4
   Simple ctrls : 2
Date: Thu Nov 19 15:26:11 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release Candidate amd64 (20091020.3)
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: pulseaudio 1:0.9.19-0ubuntu4
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-14.48+ureadahead2-generic
SourcePackage: pulseaudio
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-14-generic x86_64