[pulseaudio-discuss] pulseaudio lag at sound end

[Samuele Carcagno]

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!

Sam