[pulseaudio-discuss] pulseaudio lag at sound end

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Tanu Kaskinen at 02/10/12 22:54 did gyre and gimble:
> On Tue, 2012-10-02 at 22:16 +0200, Samuele Carcagno wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> > 
>> > I have the same issue that is described in this post (not mine)
>> > 
>> > http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/7067/do-the-play-utility-in-linux-really-have-a-delay-to-stop-its-process-with-r
>> > 
>> > basically, when I play a sound with aplay or other command line
>> > utilities, when the sound ends there is a long delay (about 3 seconds)
>> > before the program returns. This is an issue for me because I play two
>> > or more sounds in sequence from a python program for
>> > psychoacoustics research, and the silent interval between two sounds
>> > needs to be roughly controlled. I could make wav files
>> > with the sounds in sequence and silence between them, but the sounds
>> > need to be synchronized with lights, and this is not
>> > so easy to achieve with a single long wav file.
>> > 
>> > I was wondering whether there are any settings in pulseaudio that can
>> > be tweaked to reduce this sound offset lag to negligible levels.
>> > I should add that with alsa (that is when I remove pulseaudio from my
>> > system) there is not such problem, aplay starts and returns
>> > without noticeable delays. For this reason I have been living without
>> > pulseaudio so far, but some programs start not running well
>> > without it (skype on Kubuntu Precise), so it would be great if I could
>> > solve the issue.
>> > 
>> > Thanks for any help!

> First of all, this is a known issue: http://pulseaudio.org/ticket/866 .
> It's a bit tricky to fix, and so far nobody has volunteered to work on
> it

For what it's worth, this was one of the issues discussed yesterday at
our PulseConf meeting.

David said he would like to improve this behaviour. No guarantee on when
this will be done but at least there is an end in sight for this issue!

Cheers

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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