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

[Colin Beckingham]

On 06/14/2018 10:16 AM, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
> 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
>
Thanks for this nice suggestion. As you say, suspending pulseaudio and 
then running the aplay (in my case 'aplay -f cd -D hw:1,0 /dev/zero' 
fits the bill) does produce the clicking. Clearly an alsa issue. Many 
thanks.