[pulseaudio-discuss] skype sound effects create a buzzing noise

[Arun Raghavan]

On Thu, 2013-05-23 at 19:22 +0200, Julian Sikorski wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> this was annoying me long enough that I have decided to investigate.
> Basically, I am using skype-4.2 and pulseaudio-2.1 on fedora 18 x86_64.
> Whenever skype produces a sound event (incoming message bleep, logging
> in sound), buzzing noise will occur. This is especially prominent when
> playing a song in the background. I have looked at the log and the error
> message seems to be this:
> 
> D: [alsa-sink] memblock.c: Pool full
> D: [alsa-sink] memblock.c: Pool full
> D: [alsa-sink] memblock.c: Pool full
> 
> I have attached a full log. I know that PA 2.1 is really old now, but
> Fedora seems to be having hard time aligning with PA releases these days.

This happens because PulseAudio didn't handle low latency requests well
enough. This has been fixed recently, and will be available in the next
release (or in one of the 3.99.x prereleases if you can get a package
for it).

-- Arun