[SOLVED] Audio stuttering after migration to pipewire

[AECFXI]

About a year ago I attempted the pipewire migration but found that in some games or otherwise intensive system use, the audio would stutter. The stuttering behavior is moments of silence for a second to several seconds. When sound returns, it comes back correctly aligned video playback and there is no distortion during these events. Audio always returns. There is, separately from these events, short episodes of crackling from time to time.

The issue resisted all attempted fixes and was intermittent enough to just disregard, but recently when attempting to play Helldivers 2 via Steam this game was found to have extremely aggravated 'stuttering' where audio is mostly silent and cut out from the stutter effect during the tutorial mission.

Currently journalctl and dmesg appear clear of audio-related errors.

When revisiting the steps for using PipeWire for sound in the news publication, I find the only system error I am currently encountering:

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matthew@integrity ~ $ systemctl --global enable --now pipewire.socket pipewire-pulse.socket wireplumber.service
Failed to enable unit, unit /etc/systemd/user/sockets.target.wants/pipewire.socket does not exist.
Failed to enable unit, unit /etc/systemd/user/sockets.target.wants/pipewire-pulse.socket does not exist.
Failed to enable unit, file "/etc/systemd/user/pipewire-session-manager.service": Permission denied
Failed to enable unit, unit /etc/systemd/user/pipewire.service.wants/wireplumber.service does not exist.

My system profile is "default/linux/amd64/17.1/desktop/plasma/systemd/merged-usr (stable)".

emerge --info pulseaudio: https://pastebin.com/aByUQV9b

emerge --info pipewire: https://pastebin.com/fSAez86J

make.conf: https://pastebin.com/Sda7U2Qw

Next immediate step I'm looking at is resolving systemctl failing to enable the associated services.

[AECFXI]

I was able to solve this myself.

Firstly, the output from $ systemctl --global enable --now pipewire.socket pipewire-pulse.socket wireplumber.service was due to the --global flag failing. Replacing it with the --user flag eliminated the errors in the output, however this did not effect my system because those services had long been enabled since when I first migrated.

The actually effective solution for me was to adjust /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf to have the following line:

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default.clock.min-quantum = 2048

Any lower power of 2 caused crackling and stuttering with Helldivers 2 playing, albeit each uptick of this value saw an improvement. With 2048, all audio crackling across the system has been completely eliminated along with the stuttering.

It is unclear if any of the other actions I performed helped resolve the issue. I have default.clock.rate = 192000 in pipewire.conf, and I set full preempt in my kernel config.

[Anon-E-moose]

I have mine set this way.

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    default.clock.min-quantum   = 16
    default.clock.max-quantum   = 2048
    default.clock.quantum-limit = 8192

[AECFXI]

I have mine set this way.

Code: Select all

    default.clock.min-quantum   = 16
    default.clock.max-quantum   = 2048
    default.clock.quantum-limit = 8192

That is also the default config file that I started out with, but by lowering default.clock.min-quantum even down to 1024 it re-introduces the crackling and stuttering on my system.

I can honestly not think of anything distinct about my setup that would be giving rise to needing to have such an aggressive min value. There was no unusual tinkering I did before developing stutter. My system specs are:

Gentoo kernel 6.6.13
Intel i7-12700K
MSI Mag Z690 Tomahawk
32gb DDR5 RAM
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 12gb

Audio is going out through an HDMI cable to a Yamaha RX-V4A AV receiver.

I discovered the solution in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/c ... _games_or/

[Anon-E-moose]

Problem might be in wireplumber section, instead of pipewire.