[pulseaudio-discuss] Occasional heavy click from default speakers, new in openSUSE Leap 15

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Sat, 2018-06-02 at 10:36 -0400, Colin Beckingham wrote:
> On May 25 openSUSE released a new distro update Leap 15 including 
> pulseaudio 11.1
> While in general sound works very well, there are occasional loud clicks 
> from default speakers
> These loud clicks occur when loading a page in a browser or launching 
> Audacity for example
> A web page will begin to load and all will be quiet until some 
> advertising element loads
> at which point there may be, or may not be, a short set of loud clicks 
> from the speakers
> even if the speakers are not set as the default device.
> Once these initial clicks are done the rest of any true audio plays 
> correctly.
> 
> If the sound device has been recently used then there likely will be no 
> click,
> but after say 20 minutes of no audio activity then calling one of these 
> applications
> even if it does not play any audio, will very likely produce these 
> initial loud clicks.
> 
> Not sure how to troubleshoot this to get more info.
> This behaviour was not seen in the previous version of openSUSE.
> Any suggestions for next step?

Does this happen without pulseaudio? Try this:

    pasuspender -- bash
    aplay -f cd -D hw:0 /dev/zero
    exit

The first command starts a new shell, and while the shell runs,
pulseaudio won't touch the hardware. The last command exits the shell,
at which point pulseaudio will again access the hardware. The aplay
command will play silence - does that produce the same clicks?

This might be fixable in the kernel driver, here are instructions for
filing alsa bugs: http://alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Bug_Tracking

-- 
Tanu

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