[pulseaudio-discuss] PulseAudio null sink monitor gives distorted audio randomly

[Mikael Nousiainen]

On Thu, Nov 8, 2018, at 20:49, pulseaudio-discuss-request at lists.freedesktop.org wrote:
> Message: 4
> Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2018 21:31:52 +0500
> From: "Alexander E. Patrakov" <patrakov at gmail.com>
> To: General PulseAudio Discussion
> 	<pulseaudio-discuss at lists.freedesktop.org>
> Subject: Re: [pulseaudio-discuss] PulseAudio null sink monitor gives
> 	distorted audio randomly
> Message-ID: <e96e0c84-6a83-78f5-dab3-60a39b6eb9a2 at gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
> 
> [resending to the list, really this time]
> 
> On 11/8/18 7:44 PM, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
> 
> > The problem is most likely due to this bug regarding monitor sources:
> > https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/issues/304
> > 
> > Whenever the monitored sink has a rewind, a chunk of audio is
> > apparently duplicated in the monitor source. It would be great if
> > someone could figure out what goes wrong in the monitor rewinding code.
> 
> Let me quote the main mistake, from src/pulse/stream.h:
> 
> >  * The latency is stored in \a *r_usec. In case the stream is a
> >  * monitoring stream the result can be negative, i.e. the captured
> >  * samples are not yet played. In this case \a *negative is set to 1.
> 
> I.e., the design mistake is that monitor sources allow one to capture 
> samples that have not yet been played. This is always wrong, as those 
> samples can be overwritten by a rewind, and there is no "uncapture" to 
> compensate. So the fix would be to make sure that monitor sources 
> capture not what was just written to them, but what was actually played 
> and can no longer be overwritten. I.e., change the latency from negative 
> to small positive.
> 
> -- 
> Alexander e. Patrakov

Thanks for digging into this!

Some questions:

1. Is there any workaround for this without a proper bugfix and a new release?
2. Is this a question of buffer underrun / jitter bcause of  CPU usage? What is the cause for "monitor rewinds", why is it needed?
3. Why are the artifacts gone sometimes and sometimes the appear after PulseAudio restart?

-Mikael