'Twas brillig, and Jean-Yves Avenard at 10/03/11 02:41 did gyre and gimble:
Hi
On 10 March 2011 02:10, Colin Guthrie gmane@colin.guthr.ie wrote:
The problem is that the sound suddenly goes nuts and starts sounding awful. It's like some buffer pointer is just a little bit out for some reason.
I can fix the issue by closing and reopening the PCM device (as I use PA, this is just a simple "pasuspender echo" away).
The problem is very easy to reproduce - it happens about 20+ times a day to me - to the extent that I have added a panel launcher with the above fix.
I have to raise my hand on this one too... It has puzzled me for a few months now. I had thought it was related to the new video/audio card I'm using a GT220 , but this is about the same time I upgraded alsa.
Every once in a while, the audio becomes slightly distorted. Voices sounds like they are gargling with mouthwash while talking.
Interestingly, it sounds the same for AC3 or DTS passthrough, it's slightly corrupted, but not enough to break the AC3 stream from being usable by the amp.
However, closing the PCM device and re-opening it doesn't fix the issue for me ; I need to reboot.
This is seen with MythTV using ALSA directly (I wrote the audio code in MythTV)
Few MythTV users have reported it, I can't explain what is causing it..
[Resend as I used the wrong email address the first time! Things have changed since the first one tho' Jean-Yves!]
Sounds like it could be related indeed.
I've been trying an older kernel today: 2.6.36.2 with: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.23.
It worked well initially, but sadly I did get two occurrences of the problem so far (both specifically triggered rather than happening organically). This seems to tie in with my feeling that the problem started off as a nuisance but has gotten significantly more problematic with more recent kernels....
With a more recent kernel I can trigger it just changing the volume rapidly (which triggers a "bloop" noise). With this older kernel I still used this to trigger the problems, but it takes a while (it feels to take a lot longer than the newer kernel). I cannot discount this being a subjective comparison however.
I'll look further.
Col