Thursday, October 2, 2014

pulse audio clicking/popping sounds

After a recent routine update , my audio streams had clicks /pops in it which did not seem to occur  synchronously  . After some investigation I figured out that the problem was with pulseaudio  timer based scheduling . This parameter is driver specific and may be required "on" on some sound cards. 


To turn timer-based scheduling off add tsched=0 in /etc/pulse/default.pa
After editing the above file , restart pulse audio  sudo service pulseaudio restart
  
This fixed my clicks and pops but introduced another glitch which i'm working on right now. Alsamixer is reset every time I play mplayer .. aaarrgh !!!

UPDATE :  That fix was irritating . Pulse is probably broken since the latest update  . The best thing to do is use JACK :) . jack can coexist with pulse and is lighter , more efficient and works great .

start it by using  " jackd -d alsa -r 44100 "   and to make mplayer use jack , just use vo=jack :)

Problem solved