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    Audio fade in and loss of sync

    I did a stock install of kubuntu22.04 and everything seems at least acceptable. Not fine, and definitely not as good as what I have come to expect from kubuntu, but I am managing for the moment.

    Some little quibbles:
    I am running the stock uhd630 intel video on 2 4k monitors, and the "remember last session" always throws every program group on top of each other. For example, I managed at some point to have 5 dolphin windows open when shutting down, and when booted back up, all 5 were in the exact same spot, and had to be moved/closed to see what was under it.

    I used system settings to change to 'restore manually saved session' but the "save session" option never showed up. I had to remove the application launcher and re-add it to the panel for the option to save a session to appear. (and I selected and deselected "restore a manually saved session" at least 10 times, and checked each time to see if the option appeared in the power menu, where it normally resides)

    Aside from the obvious snap annoyances, the biggest problem so far is an apparent "fade in" of the audio. I would guess this is a 1/2 to 1 second fade in, and I can't seem to find any options that deal with enabling audio fade in.

    The most obvious tell of this "fade in" happening is when I delete files and the notification either does not sound, or only the very last few notes sound and they grow in amplitude - an obvious fade symptom.

    I am also using the standard realtek audio on the motherboard, and have checked for drivers, but nothing appears.

    Another audio issue is when playing video in smplayer, the audio and video are just barely out of sync, maybe 1/4 to 1/2 second. I don't know what is causing this, but I would assume it is something with the audio, and probably related to the fade issue.

    One last little annoyance is with the application launcher menu. I use the old winxp style menu, but the "expanded menu" is detached from the parent menu by a few pixels and floats beside the parent instead of being attached. I also use settings to keep focus under mouse and don't raise windows, and this makes the menu launcher unusable if a window is underneath it. When the mouse moves in the gap between the floating menu panels, the application under the launcher takes precedence and hides the menu. I guess there aren't many people that have the same settings I do for focus and stealing prevention that use the old style application launcher with the gap.

    Any suggestions on solutions within kubuntu would be appreciated. My intention was to use 22.04 LTS for several years as my main system, but given these problems, I might try a few other distros before making the long term plunge.

    #2
    If you are using pulseaudio, I recommend you read the ARCH LINUX wiki on pulseaudio. While most of it may not apply to you, but it will give you a better understanding of the configuration files involved with pulseaudio. There are some tweaks that you can make to improve sound issues listed on there. You may find the troubleshooting link helpful:
    https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pul...roubleshooting
    Particularly section four:
    • 4 Audio quality
      • 4.1 Glitches, skips or crackling
      • 4.2 Static noise when using headphones
      • 4.3 Setting the default fragment number and buffer size in PulseAudio
        • 4.3.1 Disabling timer-based scheduling
        • 4.3.2 Decide on audio device parameters
        • 4.3.3 Modify PulseAudio's configuration file
        • 4.3.4 See if it helps
      • 4.4 Choppy sound with analog surround sound setup
      • 4.5 Laggy sound
      • 4.6 Choppy/distorted sound
      • 4.7 Sound stuttering when streaming over network
      • 4.8 Pops when starting and stopping playback
    Pay particular attention to:
    Decide on audio device parameters
    Instructions below will cause PulseAudio to use a fixed size and number for audio fragments. These settings directly affect latency and power consumption. The latency is determined as default-fragments * default-fragment-size-msec, and the interrupt rate (i.e. how often the application is notified that some sound has indeed been played) is 1000 / default-fragment-size-msec
    You might try to experiment with the fragment sizes to see if this has any effect on audio quality.

    Most of the stuff listed there is not dependent on any one distribution but specific to pulseaudio on any distro.

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      #3
      As far as the windows at startup go, you may find right clicking on the title bar and selecting more actions, then tweaking the special windows settings or special application settings or both, to force windows to open in a certain place helpful. You would need to make the window rules from there after selecting either special windows settings or special application settings, it will take you to the windows rules tab in system settings to change the appropriate settings. I do not know it this is a solution for you however and there is a little bit of a learning curve as it is not intuitive or newbie friendly. Even some advanced KDE user are bewildered by window rules. You could always check to see if that would be solution for your windows placement. These settings also do not work well with gtk apps in my eperience. It will be hit or miss, but with all qt and kde apps, it generally works very well.

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        #4
        Thanks rab0171610,

        The first solution I tried was to follow the laggy sound info, and change the fragments to 5 and the ms delay to 2 - doesn't seem to impact the system too much.

        This fixed the notification lag/fade.

        The sync still is noticeable at about 1/4second in videos, and pushing the audio forward 300ms seems to fix it in smplayer, but nothing in the settings seems to handle that so far.

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          #5
          Just out of curiosity, did you by chance see the part about tsched=0? If not, research that in google and see if setting that helps.

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