Annoying clicking & popping sounds with SPDIF [SOLVED]

[Ian Clarke]

Mint 12 KDE
Hopefully this is the last of my irritating sound problems but again I don't know where to start.
I am getting annoying clicks and pops from my speakers using SPDIF whenever I click, copy, paste, resize, open, close anything, it does not happen immediately there is a couple of seconds delay then a click and a pop then a crunch (2 or 3 clicks in rapid succession) sometimes the delay is longer but it sounds like the system is trying to indicate something and not finding the correct wav sound or sound config file (I guess). It also happen at random times when I don't click anything.

Using Phonon sound mixer, in the Audio setup I have a lot of options for various configurations such as, "HDA ATI SB, ALC667-VD (IEC958 (S/PDIF) Digital Audio Output)" and "HDA ATI SB (ALC887-VD Analog)" and "alsa", there are 20 in total. Changing the preference order does not make any difference and highlighting each one and clicking on the "Test" button produces the same series of clicks and pops before plaiyng the musical test notes.

When I used Analogue Stero Output and Pulse Audio, I never had this problem.
Has anyone else experienced this and what is the best way to go about sorting this out ?

AsusM5A-78 L-M-LX motherboard
Output from "cat /proc/asound/card0/codec* | grep Codec" is; "Codec: Realtek ALC887-VD"

What other information would help ?

[Ian Clarke]

After turning off the system sounds, the problem stopped for a while but has now returned after the computer has been running for about 8 hours.
.
I didn't even know where this setting was until I stumbled over it yesterday. I didn't realise that I had sorted it until I switched the computer on again today and even then I didn't notice immediately.
For reference, it was in the System Settings under Applications And System Notifications, Then in the left hand pane in Manage Notifications click the Player Settings and selected No Audio Output. This does not seem like a logical place for system sounds it's certainly not blatantly obvous to me. I'm not new to Linux and have been using Mint 12 for over 6 months and am still frustrated at times with these kind of issues. I understand the many levels and layers of system and controls and also the huge amount of options available but this is the kind of thing that puts people off Linux and makes it 'geeky'.

"System Settings/ Applications And System Notifications/Manage Notifications//Player Settings" it was very well hidden !

I initially marked this as solved but it's obviously not.

[Ian Clarke]

Just installed a fresh version of LM12 on a new HDD and there is no such problem right now. I didn't buy a new HDD just for that purpose, it was time for an upgrade and intended to do it anyway. I'll monitor the new system and see if this problem re-occurs, hopefully it won't but if it does I'll try to determine what I changed that caused the problem and backtrack it.

It would have been nice to have been able to read one or two suggestions but it seems it's not a common problem so there were none.
Thanks for looking

[Ian Clarke]

After reading a little about digital audio, I'm putting this issue down to a faulty HDD. The fault did not appear to be a sound system fault but was more of an interference fault which was triggered every time the HDD was activated or when software on the HDD was activated. The HDD did have some serious issues which were causing very slow seek and read times although I don't have any way to measure the speed before and after, it was getting slower all the time and was excruciatingly slow towards the end. One test I did manage to run reported it had "A few bad sectors" but it was at least 10 years old !
Switching to a new Seagate Barracuda has vastly improved performance and there are no such issues, I'm just happy that I managed to switch over and transfer my important files before it completely died.


I can now mark this as SOLVED

So that's another fault solved and in the process of sorting out a number of faults in the past few months, I have replaced every component in my PC ! PSU (twice), Motherboard, CPU (twice), RAM, GPU, HDD and fans, I also decided to upgrade my monitor so I might as well upgrade the case too




Hardware:
Processor: AMD FX -4100 @ 3.60GHz (4 Cores), Motherboard: ASUS M5A78L-M LX V2, Chipset: AMD RS780 + SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0, Memory: 4096MB, Disk: 250GB Seagate ST250DM000-1BD14, Graphics: NVidia GeForce GT610 2048MB (810/500MHz), Audio: Realtek ALC887-VD (Audio still not properly configured but working perfectly).
Case; Silverstone Temjin TJ08B-E

Software:
OS: LinuxMint 12, Kernel: 3.0.0-30-generic-pae (i686), Desktop: KDE 4.7.4, Display Server: X Server 1.10.4, Display Driver: NVIDIA 280.13, OpenGL: 4.1.0 NVIDIA 280.13, Compiler: GCC 4.6.1, File-System: ext4, Screen Resolution: 1920x1080