[pulseaudio-discuss] Network audio stuttering?

[Alexander E. Patrakov]

David Davidović <david at davidovic.io>:
>
> 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.
>

Packets are sent in advance, and WiFi cannot allow for bigger packets anyway.

> 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.

You can't. It's the media player application who requests buffering
and specifies the latency. However, if pavucontrol is running, the
latency is capped to something like 20 ms, due to the misguided design
decision that monitor sinks should monitor what is written right now
(not what is playing right now).

What would help is a "pactl list sinks" on both ends while music is
playing and pavucontrol is not running.

> Has anyone else had this issue and resolved it?

Yes, by closing pavucontrol.

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov