Comment 30 for bug 280534

There are far too many issues being confused in this bug report, which makes this bug report largely incomprehensible to all but experienced ALSA triagers.

To everyone other than Rocko, please file a separate bug report for each symptom. I will address Rocko's bug summary first, since his report is the only one of import.

Firstly, sound issues such as crackling should not be assigned against ("affects") the alsa-driver source package, which, as shipped by default in Ubuntu, does not contain the sound drivers but only ships a module-init-tools configuration. Normally, they should be assigned against the linux source package. In this case, however, they need to be assigned against the pulseaudio source package.

Secondly, the crackling issue can be pinpointed as a fragments issue within the default PulseAudio configuration (/etc/pulse/daemon.conf, see default-fragments and default-fragment-size-msec toward the EOF). There is no possible manner to ship one default configuration that works on all sound hardware, because the machine configurations varying too widely.

And now, to address everyone else's interjected comments.

The widely varying (and often utterly unrelated) symptoms have several culprits that can be understood as follows:
1) Wine, when configured to use ALSA, actually routes through alsa-lib's pulse plugin. By default, this configuration in Ubuntu 8.10 means that /any/ non-native-PulseAudio application that uses ALSA will be routed through PulseAudio. There are known instances in the alsa-lib pulse plugin that perform less than stellar, and when one removes said routing from the equation, the results from Wine (and other applications) return to expected. A more definite measurement is to bypass PulseAudio completely and simply use ALSA directly, in which case one receives the (same) expected results.

2) Recording via ALSA in a default Ubuntu 8.10 configuration is known-broken and tracked in bug 282316. I'm already providing a fixed libasound2-plugins package in my PPA, and it will be in intrepid-updates after appropriate StableReleaseUpdates (SRU) testing post-release.

3) The hang-on-shutdown/reboot symptom is described in bug 274995. Please do not confuse the issues or clutter this bug report further.

4) Skype needs a specific setting in its preferences. After installing Skype on a default Ubuntu 8.10 configuration, you'll need to choose the pcm.pulse configuration.

5) If you don't hear /any/ sound regardless of whether you use ALSA directly (plughw: or hw:, not default:) or PulseAudio, then please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingSoundProblems and use the alsa-info.sh script. Remember that you need to file a bug that affects the linux source package.

Thanks for helping the audio team triagers maintain their sanity!