Crackling sound in games, pulseaudio CPU usage high (F10)
Nigel Henry
cave.dnb2m97pp at aliceadsl.fr
Mon Dec 1 16:04:14 UTC 2008
On Monday 01 December 2008 15:13, NM wrote:
> Couldn't find info about this anywhere, but I have this really annoying
> problem, whereby in games, be they ETQW (full version) or games included
> in the stock Fedora distrib, have very bad sound quality. Lots of
> crackling. The CPU usage of pulseaudio shoots up to 20% (that's on a dual
> core Pentium D).
Do you have the same sound problems when playing an audio cd, or playing music
files (.ogg, .mp3)?
>
> I can get normal perf. with ETQW by using pasuspend and forcing output to
> hw:0, but there's got to be a better solution.
If it is Pulseaudio causing the problem, and you don't use it for anything
specific, you could just disable it by removing the package
alsa-plugins-pulseaudio. If you are using KDE like me, this will also remove
the package kde-settings-pulseaudio. By doing this your audio apps will
revert to using Alsa directly. If any of the games you play use SDL, you will
need to add the following line to /home/<user>/.bashrc , which will remove
the hack that SDL programs need to use Pulseaudio.
unset SDL_AUDIODRIVER
>
> This is my sound card:
>
> 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio
> Controller (rev 02)
>
> [root at ws log]# grep -i hda dmesg
> HDA Intel 0000:00:1b.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 22 (level, low) -> IRQ 22
> HDA Intel 0000:00:1b.0: setting latency timer to 64
> hda_codec: Unknown model for ALC883, trying auto-probe from BIOS...
> ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_codec.c:3021: autoconfig: line_outs=4
> (0x14/0x15/0x16/0x17/0x0)
> ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_codec.c:3025: speaker_outs=0
> (0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0)
> ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_codec.c:3029: hp_outs=1 (0x1b/0x0/0x0/0x0/0x0)
> ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_codec.c:3030: mono: mono_out=0x0
> ALSA sound/pci/hda/hda_codec.c:3038: inputs: mic=0x18, fmic=0x19,
> line=0x1a, fline=0x0, cd=0x0, aux=0x0
What is the make and model of your Laptop/PC ?
Can you post the output from the following commands.
cat /proc/asound/version
grep ^Codec /proc/asound/card?/codec*
/sbin/lspci -vn (just the bit for the soundcard)
Did the sound just work ok post install of F10, or did you have to set model
options for snd-hda-intel?
There are a whole bunch of model options for the ALC883 codec, some of which
may give you more sliders/controls in alsamixer, when run as user in a
terminal. To see all the controls when pulseaudio is enabled, you will have
to open alsamixer as below, otherwise you will only see one control for
pulseaudio.
alsamixer -D hw:0
Crackling sounds can be a problem to resolve. I know that pulseaudio can be
responsible for low volume output, and if you are having to push the volume
up to 100% to get decent sound levels to your speakers, it could be that the
card is being pushed beyong it's capabilities. It's interesting that when you
don't use pulseaudio, the sound is ok.
I'll give you a list of model options when you post back, but I need to know
the alsa driver version, that's on F10 first.
All the best.
Nigel.
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