pulseaudio / mic issues
 

Hi everyone,

I've finally convinced my son to move from Windows to Debian :) He does a lot with stop motion, and everything he uses for that seems to work well in Linux. He's also started a YouTube channel and likes to livestream video game play. He uses obs-studio, and trying to get it to work in Windows was a nightmare. One day it works, the next day, nothing works, the next day, no video audio, the next day, no mic, etc. Mind you, this is without him changing anything. And I showed him how I can just plug that stuff into my debian machine and it all just works. So he bought it.

Now the problem - his mic is giving me serious issues. I didn't have to adjust any pulseaudio settings on my laptop, the mic just sounds find. But on his, it sounded really over-driven. I've gotten it to sound a lot better, but it's still crackly. And this doesn't change whether he's plugging in a microphone or using his laptop's built-in mic. I've searched all over trying to figure out, and I've followed a lot of tutorials. Probably the most thorough I found was this one: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php..._in_PulseAudio. I went through all of that, and I used those instructions to figure out what my frame rate should be. I also used pavucontrol and noticed that the mic was set to boost. So I turned that down. I tried toggling to tsched=0/1 option in /etc/pulse/default.pa and that didn't seem to make a different. And again, the over-driven sound is now gone, but I can't get the crackling to go away. Anybody want to help? Just let me know what info you need. Here's some preliminary stuff:

Laptop:
Lenovo 320-15ABR

$ uname -a
Linux debian-nt 4.19.0-9-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.19.118-2 (2020-04-29) x86_64 GNU/Linux

i think this is related to a bug i issued. i cannot say for certain and it doesnt solve your problem but it might help. the essential problem boils down to the driver not being built correctly into the system and so that is the issue. it culminates in pulseaudio giving off staticy out-of-sync sound.

I also had this problem but no idea how I solved it, sorry. Seems to me the crackling or popping was picked up from the software trying to interpret a system sound or thinks a drive running is "sound" or something like that. Then there's the "latency" Setting. (You might try turning system sounds OFF, see if that helps?) Pulseaudio is a pain, but easier to work with than a bare ALSA system (in some people's opinion, that is) BUT since it controls everything it might be hard to isolate a problem.

If I get crackling sounds with my inputs, it's usually because xruns are happening. Meaning: the settings are to strict for the hardware and audio samples start dropping.
You can check it with a tool like JACK -> see "Preferences"; you'll be looking for Frames/Period and Periods/Buffer settings. Try with >=512 frames and 3 periods (USB mic) OR 2 periods (internal mic).

Try asking the pulseaudio folks at https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailma...eaudio-discuss .

I lurk there and have seen quite a few similar issues addressed there.

Thanks for the suggestions. I may ask the pulseaudio people as I'd still like to resolve bthis even though I have found another solution for now: bought a $20 USB mic from Amazon and it seems to work great.