I am hoping you can give me some advice on a bug that I've been experiencing in Ubuntu for over 8 years, and that finally went away when I switched to Mint last year.
Yesterday, it started happening here, too.
Unfortunately, I am about to move to Germany and my home theater system will be on the Atlantic Ocean for the next 1-2 months, so I won't be able to play back multichannel music for a while. I will definitely keep reading this thread and updating with new info as I get it.
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
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Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start up Linux Mint 19
2. Launch e.g. VLC, SMPlayer, Parole or similar
3. Listen to multichannel music (e.g. 4.0, 5.1, 7.1 surround) until issue occurs
Current Results:
While listening to multichannel music (e.g. in FLAC format, or .mka, .mkv, .ac3, .dts, .iso...), there are occasional audio dropouts.
Expected Results:
All music should play back without issue.
Notes:
- Repro rate: unpredictable. Sometimes no issue for days, sometimes 3-4 dropouts in just 5-6 consecutive songs
- Issue never occurs at the same point in a song twice
- Issue used to occur in Ubuntu when I was using it between March 2009 and November 2017
- Issue stopped occurring when I switched to Mint in November 2017
- Issue first encountered in Mint on September 8, 2018
- Issue occurs on both my desktop and laptop PC (encountered on Sep 8th and 9th, 2018, respectively)
- Issue never encountered in stereo music in MP3, OGG or FLAC format.
Resources:
- This is what the dropout sounds like: https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/attachmen ... mple2.flac
- The following bug in VLC has similar symptoms, but only happens with faulty FLAC files and has a 100% repro rate: https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/21102
- Back in January, on an unrelated matter, I did some research on Mint's audio implemenation and found that it uses different codecs than Ubuntu ("lavc:" as opposed to "ffmpeg", fwiw). I thought they might be the reason Mint never had these dropouts. Has anything about these codecs been changed with a recent Mint update? I don't see them installed anymore when checking the codecs list in SMPlayer. Cf. this Facebook post: https://www.facebook.com/groups/linuxmi ... 652629358/
- Free 5.1 multichannel music available here:
Hardware specs - my desktop PC:
Sound device: NVidia GeForce GTX 1080Ti (HDMI out)
Playback hardware: Yamaha RX-V661 7.1 surround receiver (HDMI in)
RAM: 32 GB
CPU: Intel Core i7-4970K (4.00GHz x4)
Hardware specs - my laptop PC:
Sound device: NVidia GeForce GTX 980M (HDMI out)
Playback hardware: Yamaha RX-V661 7.1 surround receiver (HDMI in)
RAM: 32 GB
CPU: Intel Core i7-4710HQ (2.5GHz x4)