Sound is cracking

[liberalist]

Hi everyone,

My computer has a cracking sound when playing media, which is most apparent in Amarok (2.0.2). I am running a stock installation of Kubuntu 9.04 and have no idea how to solve this... My driver is HDA NVidia and I use Harman Kardon Soundstick Pro II speakers.

I appreciate all the help.

[ubersoft]

Re: Sound is cracking

When I had a cracking problem with my sound it turned out to be specifically a pulseaudio problem.

Open up your system settings window and go to the Multimedia icon in the System Administration area. Go through all the Audio Output sections and make sure that your sound card is listed first in the Output Device Preference area in the window. This has solved most of my sound crackling problems.

If that doesn't work, go over to ubuntuforums.org and read this thread:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...sound+cracking

It's a howto for fixing pulseaudio problems.

If those don't help, then I don't know what else to suggest. So I hope those help.

[liberalist]

Re: Sound is cracking

Thank you... My card was already listed at the top. As for the ubuntuforums thread, it says that Kubuntu does not use PulseAudio. Is this wrong and should I use this guide anyway? Pulseaudio is not installed on my installation (according to KPackageKit).

[dibl]

Re: Sound is cracking

As for the ubuntuforums thread, it says that Kubuntu does not use PulseAudio. Is this wrong and should I use this guide anyway? Pulseaudio is not installed on my installation (according to KPackageKit).

AFAIK, PulseAudio is an installable package (actually a set of packages) -- it's available in the repositories. I don't remember whether it was installed by default, or whether I installed it, but I have it installed. It's not on top of my list of "devices" in System Settings>Multimedia -- my HDA Intel analog and digital channels are on top of the list, but PulseAudio is there if I want to use it. So I don't think it's correct to say "Kubuntu doesn't use it" -- I would say "Kubuntu users can use it, or not, as they wish."

[liberalist]

Re: Sound is cracking

The sound quality with PulseAudio definitely seems improved , but now it sometimes causes a hiccup. I searched the net and found out that this might be caused by the CPU having too much load (2-3 applications open?), but that would not explain that the cracks consistently occur at the same time in the track. The test sound for PulseAudio from System Settings is played without any warning or hiccup, does that mean that PulseAudio should work without trouble?

The bug I found is on Launchpad, but people suffering from it generally have a working ALSA (which is the default for Kubuntu, I presume). As you know, that is not true for my case.

Anyway, thank you so much for all your kind help. It continues to amaze me how friendly people are here at Kubuntuforums (which is a major reason for me to choose kubuntu).

Should I add my scenario to the bug report or would that make people's eyes roll (as I use Kubuntu).

lspci information on my soundcard:
00:07.0 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP65 High Definition Audio (rev a1)

Is this such an exotic sound card or not?