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

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Thu, 2018-06-14 at 12:43 -0400, Colin Beckingham wrote:
> 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.

As a workaround you can remove module-suspend-on-idle from
/etc/pulse/default.pa. PulseAudio will then keep playing silence all
the time, so the pops related to opening the device won't happen.

-- 
Tanu

https://liberapay.com/tanuk
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