[pulseaudio-discuss] Network audio stuttering?

[Russell Treleaven]

Try playing music locally on the headless box and see if that stutters.
If that works try playing music over the loop back network.

On Wed, Dec 26, 2018, 12:31 PM David Davidović <david at davidovic.io wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm running a system-wide PulseAudio instance on a headless box connected
> to my speaker system. The sink is broadcast via Zeroconf and I use it to
> play music and movies via WiFi from my laptop. The headless box is
> connected to the WiFi router via a wired connection.
>
> Unfortunately, every couple of minutes or so, the sound stutters for a
> short time, then returns to normal.
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to debug the source of these
> issues? My best bet is WiFi latency. I tried increasing the buffer size
> (via default-fragments and default-fragment-size-msec) on both the client
> and server machine but I haven't seen any considerable improvement. The
> actual network packets seem to always be around 1.5K in size, which would
> be around 4ms of uncompressed sound with 32-bit stereo samples at 44.1kHz,
> and that's without any overhead. If my calculation is true, this would
> explain the stuttering, as the network latency towards the machine is at a
> baseline of ~2ms but can spike sometimes due to nature of WiFi.
>
> I'd be happy if there was a way to e.g. tell the native-protocol-tcp
> module to buffer more of the audio and play it, as I don't mind the
> increased latency; I just want to get rid of the stuttering and all
> applications I use manage PulseAudio latency compensation quite well.
>
> Has anyone else had this issue and resolved it?
>
> Many thanks for your help.
>
> Best,
> --
>   David Davidović
>   david at davidovic.io
> _______________________________________________
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> pulseaudio-discuss at lists.freedesktop.org
> https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/pulseaudio-discuss
>
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