Sound problems (sound crackling) in Helena

[hoppel]

Hi,


since the sound was working on my hardware perfectly with Gloria, I was astounded to have those difficulties:
When I play sounds with Helena, it seems to have problems with playing more than one musicfile at a time. I noticed it mainly while playing "The Battle for Wesnoth". The sound is crackling very often when an event is making a noise additional to the background musik - which is playing flawlessly. After playing for some time I already lost complete sound two times already. One time I recovered sound by reducing the loudness to zero and then turning it back (with the gdm preferences).
I didn't have this problem with the previous versions of Mint.
My hardware is the onboard sound of the ASUS M3N78 pro moainboard. This seems to be a Realtek ALC1200. Any help?

[surfjdh]

My sound cracks too, but only when playing stepmania songs, so i guess its something with stepmania.

[ej64]

With HD Audio the crackling often is caused by power management of the HD Audio device.

Open a terminal and type:

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cat /proc/asound/cards

If it mentions "HDA Intel" you can try the following:

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gksu gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

Find the line that starts with

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options snd-hda-intel power_save

type a # at the very beginning of this line to disable power management. Then save the file and restart Mint.

Since I made this tiny correction I've got no cracklings any more

[Mike65]

I was removed pulseaudio. Since I made this tiny correction I've got no cracklings any more

[hoppel]

@ ej64:

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cat /proc/asound/cards

gives me

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HDA-Intel - HDA NVidia
HDA NVidia at 0xfe024000 irq 21

I have a line

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options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N

would you advise me to '#' it?




@ Mike65: Do you mean a specific package?

[Mike65]

I Just went to the package manager and removed pulseaudio. It was offered to remove some other packages, and i accepted it.

[ej64]

@ ej64:
I have a line

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options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N

would you advise me to '#' it?

Yes, I would try it. If the crackling's gone you're fine, if not you can restore the line anyway.

[hoppel]

I tried it, and it seems to work. Needs further research though, because yesterday I played just for a short time.

Yes, I would try it. If the crackling's gone you're fine, if not you can restore the line anyway.

[hoppel]

Ok, tried longer - seems to reduce the error, but does not remove it. The sound has still some flaws, but it doesn't crash completely like the last time. Maybe I try removing pulseaudio next...

Edit: Again I got a crash - and this time the soundsystem crashed the x-server, too. It wasn't even possible to restart the x-server, I had to reset the computer. Horrifying, I guess, I have to remove pulseaudio. I hope I get it done. I would change back to Gloria, but there my networking didn't run properly...

another edit: this doesn't help either.

[Lantesh]

type a # at the very beginning of this line to disable power management. Then save the file and restart Mint.

Thanks for the tip. Back in Mint 7 I had terrible problems with sound that were only resolved by upgrading my kernel to 2.6.31, and also upgrading ALSA and Pulse Audio to newer versions. After all of that I still experienced crackling when adjusting the volume. This issue carried over with Mint 8 (well actually I'm using Karmic converted to Mint while waiting for the x64 release), which makes sense as Mint 8 uses the 2.6.31 kernel and the same ALSA and Pulse versions I had upgraded Mint 7 to. Your tip has significantly helped my volume crackling issue. It's almost completely gone now. Thank you!

[byisk]

What do I see? I thought I'm the only one with such a problem, but obviously I was wrong. I want to say a few words about my issue. I hardly play games, there is only one game I play regularly - TeeWorlds. I really love this game, but it is not so significant. What is important now, that is a problem with sound. I have played this game running under Helena several times for test and sound either is played as dippy or isn't played at all! There is a tool called Sound Preferences and I had come with an idea that is a problem with muting. So I ran TeeWorlds within window, not a full-screen mode, and I went to Applications tab in Sound Preferences. What did I see was blanking icon with the name of application

I will try Mike's solution, but I'm scared a lil' bit, because I used to execute such crazy ideas under Ubuntu and everything went wrong. The principal problem was the Alsa - Ubuntu just didn't let me use DMix, so I had to play sounds only from one application at time!

By the way, I'm thinking about reaintallation Helena. I have some issues with my hardware, I'm not really sure my memory is working well. I used some mainboard with AMD chipset, so on-board graphics card was Radeon, and it was probably broken down, because I had been getting a lot of segmentation faults. I had tested memory then and it showed me some errors. As I could remember this motherboard was overheated. So I replaced my mainboard (everything took me less than a one day, because I have some additional hardware for replacing) and some problems vanished, but not all of them. The new mainboard is based on NVidia platform. The first thing I had to do, was compile a module to kernel with nvidia driver, which is really easy, and it is default way to install nvidia drivers in Debian. I had to do this, because after replacing motherboard, X Server didn't want to get up. I rebooted my machine and I saw blurred picture on the screen I have been trying to configure that to now. I made a lot of things, even installed drivers from Mint's repository - there's v. 185 in Mint's repo and I had 190.42 - but it changed nothing. Then I realized that it could be a problem with refreshing the picture, so I changed refreshing from 60 to 75 Hz in nvidia-settings and picture is awesome now, but compiz stopped working at all. Even back to the previous configuration doesn't help this window manager. I'm really sad about this

Does anyone know what the hell is going on?

I'm removing Pulse Audio now and if it doesn't help me, I will reinstall Helena.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot it. I wanted to say that I had "options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N" line hashed already.

Whoops. It looks like NVidia driver broke down, because it really doesn't want to allow me to play this game ^^'

Screenshot-Terminal.png

EDIT2: I recompiled nvidia kernel module, it told me I had driver already and it was going to be replaced, I agreed and voila! Compiz works, teeworlds works, also sound in all applications except Totem (dunno why) - teeworlds, vlc, decibel-audio-player etc. Hurray!