Bug 440901

Hm, this kind of problem is a bit hard to track.

Could you check whether this happens with a standard program like aplay without pulseaudio?

Anyway, please run /usr/bin/alsa-info.sh with --no-upload option, and attach the generated file to here.

aplay sounds like it works fine.

If I open up the Gnome Sound preferences, select ALSA, and then click test, I hear the clicks and pops.  Maybe this is a GStreamer thing?  Odd.  Now I can't get it to click with PulseAudio though...  At least through the Sound Preferences.  When I open up a movie / song in Totem, it clicks still. (ALSA / PulseAudio)

I don't have this /usr/bin/alsa-info.sh script you speak of.  Where can I get it?

Sorry, it was a typo.  It's in /usr/sbin/.

Created attachment 249376 [details]
alsa-info.sh Output

The driver setup looks OK.  This sounds rather like a gstreamer/PA problem...

Reassigned to GNOME guys who may have a better clue about them.

Fixed as of 11/07/2008 with the new packages in factory.

I take that back.  After popping in some headphones, and listening to some music, the clicks and pops are still there, but not as often as it was before.  It's still pretty bad.

Alright.  I _think_ I figured it out.  I am no longer hearing any pops or cracks at all.  What I did was I opened up the YaST sound module and noticed next to the card it said "Not configured".  Eh???  Needless to say, I clicked "edit" and configured it.

I'm kind of confused on why my sound was working before.  Needless to say, before I mark this as fixed again, I'm going to wait a day or so to confirm it sticks.

Well, it was perfect until I ran Wine (Starcraft  w/ ALSA)...  That just made everything unbearable.  (Nothing but clicking and popping.)

Restarted ALSA / Pulseaudio, but it's clicking and popping again, like it was originally.  Oh well.  I felt pretty good there for the 10 minutes that it worked correctly.

Any ideas?

Alright.  Beta 5/RC1.  Beta 5/RC1 is _much_ better.  However, I can still repeat it by playing a song in Totem, and then hovering my mouse pointer over another song in Nautilus.  (I have audio-preview enabled.)

Beta 5/RC1 is not perfect, but it sounds like the sound issue is about 95% gone.

If I'm playing music in Totem, and then open up Wine, this is even a bit better, but it still does click and pop.  I can tolerate it at the point it's at now.

Still having this issue with the latest factory build.  One thing I've noticed is that I get virtually no popping / cracking when my master volume is at 100%, if any at all.  If it's lower than that, I'll get a lot of popping / cracking.  This is while I'm using PulseAudio.  To work around this issue, I've been altering volumes in the programs themselves, which is rather inconvenient, but at least it works.

RC1 (the real one this time) is still having this issue.  No obvious warnings or anything are being logged to the system console, so I've got no idea what to do.

Just installed 11.1 RC1 on my Thinkpad (was 11.0), and I'm having this issue on here too.  This makes me think it's not just me having this issue.

Basically, if I am playing music in Banshee, and then I go watch some flash videos online, I get a lot of popping / skipping sounds going on like the two are interfering with each other.  I have to stop one of them in order to listen to the other without interference. 

Can confirm this for 11.1 RC1 for applications using ALSA, even after checking and following the "Perfect Setup" for PulseAudio (http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup) I did not get a solution:
Twinkle 1.3.2 for instance is unusable since its usage is based on sound. The same problem with kaffeine for KDE3, but this might be another issue (ARTS), using arts over esound made it even worse.

On the other hand, Skype 2.0.0.72 reconfigured to use the "pulse" sound instead of alsa according to the above manual works fine, after adding users to some pulse* groups and following the instructions mentioned on the above wiki, no stuttering here. Thus, this seems not to be unsolveable.
Another good message: KDE4 on phonon-gstreamer plays sounds very well including all applications with a "perfect" PulseAudio setup. MPlayer works also well using pulseaudio directly.

For me it still looks like a bad pulseaudio integration with particular non-KDE4 sound systems.

For the record, I 'fixed' this issue completely on my EEE PC by removing PulseAudio and installing ESD.  I'm going to leave my other laptop with PulseAudio installed, so this bug will still affect me.

Having figured this out, OpenSUSE 11.0 did not have this issue with PulseAudio installed, so I don't know what's up with that.  This 'glitch-free' motto for PulseAudio does not appear to be entirely accurate from what I've been experiencing.  My sound breaks up more than ever before with this PulseAudio installation that's included in OpenSUSE 11.1.

I'm not ranting or anything, I'm just pointing out some of my observations.

Sound in Wine works perfectly too, even while I have music playing.

Created attachment 258451 [details]
Another also-info.txt

I just added another alsa-info.txt for 11.1 RC 1. I hear clicks and pops no matter whether I use Rhythmbox, Songbird, or Totem, and sometimes the sound disappears until I skip to the next song (MP3).

Is there a recommended current sound configuration from Novell for RC1? What backend to use in KDE4 - phonon-gstreamer, phonon-xine? What about xine, which versions are to installed, from which repositories. What is special about KDE3? Is there any useful information in the WiKi?
I would be glad to use sophisticated sound back-ends and front-ends, but the PulseAudio thing simply doesn't work reliably throughout the front ends a normal desktop user would use. Something plays, something doesn't, missing a working interface. Isn't it too early to deliver a distribution based on PulseAudio sound?

Rodrigo: I would guess it's a duplicate of another bug.

I receive noise on games such as Tremulous.  It is possible to minimise this problem by making PA run as realtime priority.

Here's a note that the problem's not unique for suse 11.1. I had pops and cracks in ubuntu 8.10 too.

Created attachment 269060 [details]
Another alsa-info.txt

I'm with this problem too. I'm using openSuse-11.1

I did a new configuration with alsa, pulseaudio and xine on kde-4.2. I configured alsa to use pulseaudio and configured xine and sdl to use alsa. Now, my sound hasn't noise. :)

Before, I configured them to use pulseaudio. I'm hopeful that this tip help someone.

(In reply to comment #23)
> I did a new configuration with alsa, pulseaudio and xine on kde-4.2. I
> configured alsa to use pulseaudio and configured xine and sdl to use alsa. Now,
> my sound hasn't noise. :)
> 
> Before, I configured them to use pulseaudio. I'm hopeful that this tip help
> someone.

Hi Michel,
good news, but I wonder whether this change makes sence at all. Is there any visible or "hearable" advantage of reconfiguring the sound system the way you described?

(In reply to comment #24)
> (In reply to comment #23)
> > I did a new configuration with alsa, pulseaudio and xine on kde-4.2. I
> > configured alsa to use pulseaudio and configured xine and sdl to use alsa. Now,
> > my sound hasn't noise. :)
> > 
> > Before, I configured them to use pulseaudio. I'm hopeful that this tip help
> > someone.
> 
> Hi Michel,
> good news, but I wonder whether this change makes sence at all. Is there any
> visible or "hearable" advantage of reconfiguring the sound system the way you
> described?

Sorry! After I did reboot, my pulseaudio backs with your noise. Disregard my comment... :(

I'm using pulseaudio-0.9.12-9.6-i586. Did anyone update the pulseaudio and has the problem yet?

Could be the waveform interfence bug, have to check if we have that patch.

This is probably bug 461361.  I'm going to dupe this bug to that one because it has the upstream bug info.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 461361 ***