No sound/Choppy sound

[clickwir]

Re: No sound/Choppy sound

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...io/+bug/434436 Post #13 says to get a better pulseaudio log.

So I did what he said, went here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio/Log and got a log. I've attached it. I don't know if it's useful or not.

Note: Manually choosing ALSA in VLC didn't seem to make a difference. I tried a couple .wav files, .mp3 and .ogg files.

[doctordruidphd]

Re: No sound/Choppy sound

FYI _ signing off for the night. Maybe someone else has ideas?

[clickwir]

Re: No sound/Choppy sound

Thanks for your help. At least we've helped eliminate some things.

[doctordruidphd]

Re: No sound/Choppy sound

Thought about this for a whiole.

1. First, you need to determine if the driver for your card is being loaded.

lsmod | grep ctxfi

If it shows up in the first column, it's loaded. If not, then try:
sudo modprobe snd-ctxfi


2. You may want to try a different phonon backend.

Systemsettings > multimedia > phonon > backend

and see what it's using (probably gstreamer)
you could try another if it's listed ( you may need to reboot). If there are no onther backends listed, you can install them
sudo apt-get install phonon-backend-vlc phonon-backend-xine


3. Try running speaker-test. This will give you some audio to play with. If you have headphones, try plugging them in and playing with pavucontrol, to see if you can get audio out of them.

4. Check to see if you have a /etc/asound.conf file. Apparently in some cases, alsa is not installing properly.

[clickwir]

Re: No sound/Choppy sound

Yup. ctxfi is loaded. I just did some rebooting testing with different backends. Xine was the only one, I added gstreamer and vlc. VLC just kind of hung the system like VLC does when having this problem. I get massive I/O and the system is all but completely unresponsive. Adding gstreamer and making it the top choice didn't make a difference.

speaker-test I hear nothing.

I do not have a /etc/asound.conf file.

However, if I do "alsa reload" I hear bumps. If I kill and restart pulseaudio, I can hear a crackle for about .25 seconds. It's reliable. I can alsa reload all day and hear a couple quick bumps. But nothing else.

[doctordruidphd]

Re: No sound/Choppy sound

I do not have a /etc/asound.conf file.

That bothers me, because it's not the first time I have heard that. I do have one, and if it isn't set up properly, alsa dies. Now this is an old system, been upgraded regularly since 8.10. I really don't know what a newly installed mm system looks like, in terms of what config files are there and are not.
Maybe someone with a working freshly installed system can advise as to whether or not they have an /etc/asound.conf file.

You might want to try, just as an experiment, setting up an /etc/asound.conf file for pulse. Mine has the following lines:

pcm.pulse {
  type pulse
}
ctl.pulse {
  type pulse
}
pcm.!default {
  type pulse
}
ctl.!default {
  type pulse
}

You may need to reboot, or restart alsa for this to take effect.

Another thing to try might be to switch, at least temporarily, to your internal sound card. That would entail enabling it in the BIOS, and selecting it in pavucontrol.

At this point the only other option I can see is to remove pulseaudio altogether. That's not a trivial thing to do, but not impossible either. Since I have had to do it several times for testing purposes, I've got the steps down. Note that you do this at your own risk, I can't guarantee the outcome on your system.
This is one of those "READ EVERYTHING BEFORE DOING ANYTHING" deals here:

To remove the packages, add these diverts:
(From: http://www.jeffsplace.net/node/12)

sudo dpkg-divert --add --divert /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstpulse.so.ubuntu --rename /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstpulse.so

sudo dpkg-divert --add --divert /usr/bin/pulseaudio.ubuntu --rename /usr/bin/pulseaudio

You will also need to create a dummy /usr/bin/pulseaudio file that contains only one line:
#!/bin/sh
and then sudo chmod a+x /usr/bin/pulseaudio

If you tried the asound.conf example above, you will need to remove that as well, once pulse is gone.

Now this all assumes you are using the gstreamer backend in phonon (do you have gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio installed? If not, that could be a problem.)

You may have to reconfigure gstreamer using gstreamer-properties after you remove pulseaudio, and then again after reinstalling it. Ditto for xine, though to reconfigure xine you need only go to xine > settings > setup > configuration-experinece-level expert, and then audio > audio driver to use. I have never used or setup the vlc backend, so I can't say there

Best to reboot after doing this.

To reinstall pulseaudio:

sudo rm /usr/bin/pulseaudio
sudo dpkg-divert --rename --remove /usr/bin/pulseaudio
sudo dpkg-divert --rename --remove /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstpulse.so


If all this fails, then I would really suggest filing a bug report against pulseaudio on launchpad. The person I ran into over there (D. Chen) was very helpful in explaining what needed to be done.

[clickwir]

Re: No sound/Choppy sound

I'll try a couple things and let you know. This was a fresh install of Kubuntu, so if asound.conf isn't there, I can only assume it's not supposed to be. But I just added your suggestion and am going to reboot in a few.

I'm also going to reinstall Kubuntu on a spare laptop and I'll know if that file should be there or not.

[clickwir]

Re: No sound/Choppy sound

Well... good news and bad news. I did some googling around and saw many others were having trouble with X-Fi cards in particular. So I removed the X-Fi and put in an old Diamond Monster Sound (snd_es1968) and sound is flawless.

[doctordruidphd]

Re: No sound/Choppy sound

Well, I don't know about all this....

I got the xfi-card for my system, thinking that, since the new drivers were about to come out, there would be support for its advanced features, like the crystallizer. That never happened, essentially I get nothing more from it that the on board hda stuff, so I just put it on the shelf.

Anyway, glad to hear you have sound going somehow.

[clickwir]

Re: No sound/Choppy sound

I take that back. I get sound, but it's still choppy. Still getting a lot of pulseaudio ratelimit in /var/log/messages.

Oct 31 23:22:49 ruger10-22 pulseaudio[1641]: ratelimit.c: 6233 events suppressed
Oct 31 23:23:30 ruger10-22 pulseaudio[1641]: ratelimit.c: 6250 events suppressed
Oct 31 23:23:35 ruger10-22 pulseaudio[1641]: ratelimit.c: 22715 events suppressed
Oct 31 23:23:40 ruger10-22 pulseaudio[1641]: ratelimit.c: 14886 events suppressed

I don't know. I guess I better wait till pulseaudio gets fixed again. I don't know what else could be going on.

It was working... till I tried playing a song in VLC. Got most of the way through a song, then started getting choppy. If I go into System Settings > Multimedia > Phonon and do a TEST from there. It plays the KDE sound, gets most of the way through it and then gets choppy. Then more ratelimits in the logs. It's like I'm hitting a buffer limit or something. I was able to watch a 2 min youtube vid fine on fresh boot... now it lags the whole system.

I think I still want to punch pulseaudio in the face.

[doctordruidphd]

Re: No sound/Choppy sound

I know it's not a fun thing to do, but at this point you really do need to file a bug report. It won't get fixed if the developers don't know there is a problem.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug/?no-redirect

[clickwir]

Re: No sound/Choppy sound

It's painful... but I did it. Thanks for your help. Hopefully someone there will look here and get some more info that I might have left out.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...io/+bug/669729