[pulseaudio-discuss] The module "module-suspend-on-idle" sounds optional, but is strictly required

[Christian Iversen]

Hi everybody

I was playing around with disabling suspend-on-idle, since my sound card 
makes rather loud clicks and pops on resume.

So, I tried commenting the line

"""
load-module module-suspend-on-idle
"""

in ~/.pulse/default.pa

And that works for a little while, but then PA hangs. Every program that 
tries to play audio just hangs at 0:00.

I googled a bit, and found this blog:

http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2013/02/10/fixing-poppingclicking-audio-on-raspberry-pi/

He described a similar problem with a similar (but not identical) 
soundcard. He also had the following conclusion:

"""
What is worse is that if module-suspend-on-idle is disabled there’s no 
audio output. When PulseAudio switches the format, the driver is 
suspended but never resumes. There are some comments in the PulseAudio 
source which suggest that module-suspend-on-idle is assumed to be 
available and is responsible for resuming drivers on a format change. 
Therefore the work-around for the popping, of disabling 
module-suspend-on-idle, isn’t suitable when the audio input format is 
not stereo at 48,000 Hz.
"""

He suggested this workaround:

load-module module-suspend-on-idle timeout=604800

Where the idle-time is set to 1 week. This works!

It solved my problem, but my programmer gene is irked by this hidden 
dependency. Worst of all, the failure mode is silent-total-fail, which 
is not the greatest situation ;-)


So my question to this list: Is module-suspend-on-idle really a 
requirement? How difficult would this be to fix?

-- 
Med venlig hilsen
Christian Iversen