Comment 115 for bug 190754

Daniel,

Thanks for not marking the pulseaudio task invalid yet, as I have a theory as to why some applications stutter.

If you can bear with me by installing the Debian unstable versions of libasound2/libasound2-plugins and run pulseaudio in verbose mode, it exposes some odd behaviour for certain applications:

Skype (ALSA version, preconfigured to use the "pulse" device in Options): When you launch Skype, it opens and closes 57 client connections just to play the 3 second "startup" sound (which plays, albeit with stutter). Starting a call to "test123" works, yet it causes about a dozen client connections *per second*. This behaviour does not seem correct to me. I think that my earlier theory re: lowering the buffer helped this situation as each new client connection did not have to wait as long for a buffer to fill, therefore the sound did not appear to stutter as badly.

SDL application using libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio (i.e. neverball): opens one client connection in PulseAudio that remains stable.

SDL application using libsdl1.2debian-alsa* & configuration from bug #198453: opens and closes approximately two connections per second (much less than Skype, but surely this is not correct behaviour).

(By the way, neither Skype nor SDL applications using the -alsa backend work with Hardy's libasound2/libasound2-plugins).

It seems there is still a problem in PulseAudio and/or the pcm_pulse ALSA plugin (even if updated to Debian's version) that can cause symptoms that appear to be buffer underruns, and should be investigated.