Audio output pauses for unknown reason (WORKAROUND)

[duby2291]

I'm not sure exactly how to describe the bug. Whether it's streaming video thru youtube on firefox or watching a local movie in smplayer or even listening a local mp3 with audacious, every so many seconds the sound will just pause. The only application I found that reflects this is pavucontrol under the output devices tab. Not only does it get paused somehow but the volume slider gets pushed down to something like 10%. The interval between the events is sometimes only a few seconds to 10s of minutes.

Has anyone seen anything like this before? Does it sound like a physical problem? Could it be something like a jack detection issue?[/quote]

[Sharp_Rulez]

Similar issue here.

Got some workaround, but didnt have time to "search for a solution"

Checkout dmesg, i am flooded with these:

[duby2291]

hmm, well "dmesg | grep pulseaudio" comes blank. Perhaps I need to enable addition logging in my kernel config? If that is a possibility I can post it.

[hrnick]

[duby2291]

So now that We know multiple folks are experiencing this, I think I can rule out this being a physical hardware problem on my computer. Do you guys think I should file a bug report on gentoo's bugzilla? If so what information should I provide so that it would be effective?

[Baritone]

I have same isue.
AMD64,
00:14.2 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)
01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cedar HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5400/6300 Series]

[hrnick]

[duby2291]

Ok, so now I'm coming across another bug that I think is directly related....

I recently bought a Blue Ice USB microphone, it literally just plugged in and worked, no hassle. I'm mixing voice over a beat, and I realized that when Iplug in the headphones into the headphone jack on the front panel, PA doesn't mute the desktop speakers or turn on the headphone jack. So I opened pavucontrol and selected the headphone port to enable the headphone jack but it still does not mute the desktop speakers. Ok fine, but then seconds later it automatically, by itself, switches back to the line in jack.... WTF. I'm really pissed. No error messages, undefined behavior, erratic behavior, and multiple people experiencing it...

EDIT: Really it's the obviously bugged behavior with no error messages that pisses me off the most. I can't even begin to define it let alone fix it because there is absoluteluy no indication of what is wrong. Even though it's completely obvious that something is wrong.

[eccerr0r]

Pulseaudio is a userland application, so it won't show up as a kernel issue. You may want to check your syslog or if running systemd, journal (journalctl) for information.

The behavior being described can happen when you have a mixture of pulseaudio applications and alsa applications that are not using pulseaudio-alsa properly. For the most part I've found that pulseaudio on my machine (gnome/systemd) works fine, with the occasional (once every few weeks or so) exception where sound gets corrupt from wine. Restarting wine fixes the problem, but this isn't the problem you're having.

Do you have USE=alsa-plugin for media-sound/pulseaudio (this should be default now)? What sound applications are you using (please also include mixers, including the ones part of your DE). Make sure they are all using USE=pulseaudio if they can. Might want to emerge --newuse @world to clean out some use flags.
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

[hampelratte]

I'm not sure, if this is related to your problems, but I also had the problem, that pulseaudio stopped working. This happened, whenever I enabled the second screen via KDE/xrandr. I first didn't see a connection and thought WTF, pulseaudio?!?, But then I realized, that my second screen is connected via HDMI. So the graphics card probably enables the internal soundcard, whenever the output is enabled. I don't know why, but pulseaudio somehow decides, that's that the better output and switches to it. But I can go to the systems settings and switch that back.

[hrnick]

Does anyone have any updates or new ideas?

[hrnick]

I tried this but unfortunately it didn't help.

[Logicien]

Close any graphical session will stop pulseaudio. It can be verified with the ps command. Than if you open a user session in a Linux terminal on tty1 and play a sound file or a video file (mplayer can on a Linux framebuffer) does the sound stop and go down? Without Pulseaudio controlling the sound card audio applications use Alsa directly. It's a test I propose to be sure that the problem occur only when Pulseaudio is active.

You can disable the Pulseaudio application when start and you X and a desktop session and start it by your own with some useful options like

[hrnick]

Thanks for your input Logicien!

It's Pulseaudio related for sure, the problem does not occur in Audacious using the ALSA plugin but it does when the Pulseaudio one is used. Firefox always has the problem and it uses Pulseaudio since some time back.

I ran a pulseaudio -k and started running it again using the log level you suggested. I'll get back once I've taken a look at the logs.

Thanks again!

[hrnick]

I have created two logs.

The first one is the startup of pulseaudio (pulseaudio -k && pulseaudio --log-level=4 --log-target=file:pulse.log --start).

The second one is the log after successfully starting the daemon and playing music using Audacious and the Pulseaudio plugin. After the problem occurred once pulseaudio -k was run.

What caught my attention was the following:

[Logicien]

There is a Pulseaudio module call module-suspend-on-idle who can be disabled by put the related lines in remark in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf /etc/pulse/default.pa and /etc/pulse/system.pa. It suspend Pulseaudio after 5 seconds of idle time I think.

For tests purpose I propose that you only keep one sound card active and disable all others in the Configuration tab of Pavucontrol and uncheck all options in Paprefs. Of course Pulseaudio must be restarted.
_________________
Paul

[hrnick]

I found module-suspend-on-idle in /etc/pulse/system.pa and /etc/pulse/default.pa and commented the line in both. This did not help.

The only thing listed under the Configuration tab in pavucontrol is Built-in Audio and all its profiles. Everything is unchecked in paprefs.

Thanks for your help so far!

[Fitzcarraldo]

Have you tried adding 'tsched=0' in /etc/pulse/default.pa as shown below, and restarting PulseAudio? That option disables timer-based audio scheduling and enables interrupt-driven audio instead. I've had to do that in the past on some machines. Worth a try, anyway.

[hrnick]

Thanks for the suggestion Fitzcarraldo, unfortunately it didn't help.

I've continued the troubleshooting and noticed the following:

1. I am using a digital TOSLINK output on the motherboard right now. I don't get the same problems using an analog 3.5 mm output connected to a stereo.

2. If both the digital and analog outputs are connected and the digital one is used it will switch to the analog output as soon as the problem occurs. Log can be found here.

So it seems to be related to the digital output.

[hrnick]

This is what I can find upstream that is similar to this problem. They're both pretty old though (started in 2012 and no post for over two years):

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54881
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49608

Does anyone else have any ideas or is it time to create a bug upstream? Do you have any more input duby2291 and Baritone? Has any of the steps we have tried here worked for you?

[duby2291]

[hrnick]

Updating pulseaudio to version 10.99.1 did not make a difference, it actually introduced some other errors so I downgraded to 10.0 again.

[hrnick]

Same thing in pulseaudio v11.0.

So do you think it's a good time for an upstream bug report...?

[duby2291]

[hrnick]