I'm sick and tired of sound braking up!!!!

eantoranz · 04-14-2006, 10:43 PM

I've had it with linux sound. I want to have a sinple stright answer to this problem.

I have tried all possible sound arrangements so that I can have reliable sound in a long time... but every single one fails. Let's see the ones I've tried:

OSS output: forget it. I want to have a shared sound and not every application complaining because another is using the device.

ALSA output: This is the most stable one.... but very often, when one application starts playing while there's another already polaying something.... or if one application stops playing when another is playing, it simply hangs all sound applications... and I HATE IT, because I have to restart all sound applications.

ESD on top of OSS or ALSA: sometimes applications complaing because ESD is busy.

so.... what am I missing here? Does anyone of you have a reliable sound environment? or I'm just the only one with this problem?

Code:

0000:02:03.0 Multimedia audio controller: ESS Technology ES1983S Maestro-3i PCI Audio Accelerator (rev 10)
        Subsystem: Dell ES1983S Maestro-3i (Dell Inspiron 8100)
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 5
        I/O ports at dc00 [size=256]
        Memory at f6ffe000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
        Capabilities: [c0] Power Management version 2

foo_bar_foo · 04-15-2006, 12:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by eantoranz

I've had it with linux sound. I want to have a sinple stright answer to this problem.

I have tried all possible sound arrangements

we could help -- but the situation like most things Linux/Unix is more complex and of course more powerfull and diverse than you are willing to admit or deal with or figure out.

foo_bar_foo · 04-15-2006, 12:21 AM

ok i felt lousy just blowing you off so here my one simple solution
(of course i have about 50 others if this one doesn't help)

Code:

setpci -v -s 02:03.0 latency_timer=ff

eantoranz · 04-15-2006, 10:49 AM

can you explain me what it does? and when should I run that command? boot time?

foo_bar_foo · 04-15-2006, 09:30 PM

first just run it as root to see if it helps
it set the "latency 32" setting shown in your lspci output to
latency 176

it seems counterintuitive to increase latency but this will make less writes across the pci buss to the soundcard and increase the burst size for each write. hopefully the results will be less sound coagulations.

if it works and its all you need to do you can add the command to the bottom of any boot script that runs late in the sequence
i put junk like this at the bottom of my firewall (terrible teribble hackery)

i think after this we need to address if you are using sofware sound mixing "dmix" or relying on your soundcards hardware.

eantoranz · 04-15-2006, 11:23 PM

and you're gonna help me in every step of the process? ;

:-D
I'll try the latency and tell you how it goes in the coming days. ff means 255 in this case?

Ygrex · 04-16-2006, 01:59 AM

For combining several streams into single there's arts.

foo_bar_foo · 04-16-2006, 02:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by eantoranz

ff means 255 in this case?

yea -- for some reason setpci turn it into 248
i put 176 earlier not thinking
176 is b0
definitely use ff (255) for the soundcard
it might also help to increase latency across the PCI bridge to 176 (b0)

eantoranz · 04-16-2006, 02:59 PM

so far, sound hasn't crashed, but right now is happening something that usually happens to me with alsa: Sound is in 2X right now. with mplayer: if I play a video or sound file, it's played at twice the normal speed (video & sound) (tried as my normal mortal user and with sudo just in case... both were played at 2X).

eantoranz · 04-16-2006, 03:07 PM

I'm listening to something with amarok now..... god! It sounds so sureal. The time pace is OK, but sounds are one octave high.... so I guess amarok is sending streams at a time and measuring the times that goes by. alsa would be playing them at twice the speed. :-S

eantoranz · 04-16-2006, 03:08 PM

oh... and there are many gaps per second in amarok.

eantoranz · 04-16-2006, 03:10 PM

I kept changing latency while playing in amarok... but it didn't change anything. (I feel like I'm stumbling agains wall after wall).

eantoranz · 04-16-2006, 03:36 PM

this is crazy. Sound is back to normal again. I have configured amsn to use mplayer to "ring the bells". One of those events caused the sound to go back to normal pace.

foo_bar_foo · 04-16-2006, 09:49 PM

when you say alsa you mean alsaplayer ?

this is very confusing because i can't examine the files you are playing and their format.
sometimes if you record a raw audio file without headers another program if left to defaults will assume 2 channels. if it's just one chanel it will come out twice as fast.

you havn't said what kind of machine this is ?
does the clock run normally ?

at first impression it sounds like a hardware problem like your BIOS are all screwed up from overclocking or from a storm or something.

you will have to be more specific about file formats
show output from the "file" command on the test file you are playing
and all settings like output method and what not before any meaningfull discussion can go forward.

eantoranz · 04-17-2006, 08:45 AM

I mean I'm using the alsa driver for my sound card (and the clients use alsa as their engine).