Audio Popping Crackling Overdrive

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smithxi

Trainee

Posts: 81

Sunday, December 17th 2006, 10:50am

Audio Popping Crackling Overdrive

I'm getting a lot of audio popping and crackling with all types of media playback. The test sound in KControl is fine, but all videos and music pops and crackles. I've configured volumes in alsamixer to be within the yellow areas. My onboard audio model is NVidia CK804 IEC958 Playback AC97-SPSA. It is a 6 channel audio chipset. It seems there is not a solution to the problem, for as much research as I've done about it, but I am wondering if KDE4 will have fixes for this, or when I could possibly see a resolution to this problem, and why the problem occurs. Any information is a huge help. Thanks.

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ipspeł

Beginner

Posts: 40

Monday, December 18th 2006, 1:16pm

Re: Audio Popping Crackling Overdrive

What players have you tried? Anything using arts is always a bad idea. Have you tried MPlayer with ALSA or OSS audio output?

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smithxi

Trainee

Posts: 81

Tuesday, December 19th 2006, 4:16am

amarok with the xine engine. I just tried kmplayer with the xine engine, but the same problem occured. the engines mplayer and gstreamer do not play anything in kmplayer, and are not even shown in amarok. the popping even occurs in VLC. I've tried setting 48000khz audio in KControl.

This post has been edited 1 times, last edit by "smithxi" (Dec 19th 2006, 4:18am)

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ipspeł

Beginner

Posts: 40

Tuesday, December 19th 2006, 1:55pm

Re: Audio Popping Crackling Overdrive

Well, you can try MPlayer alone, or KPlayer which is the best GUI for it.

But if that doesn't help, then it may be some sort of configuration issue, like an interrupt conflict or somesuch. I've seen something similar a few years ago, when I had sound popping and cracking whenever there was significant hard drive activity, but then it went away and never happened again.

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smithxi

Trainee

Posts: 81

Thursday, December 21st 2006, 10:08am

the problem is global. all system sounds. i believe it's the driver, and I'm curious to ask if in kde4 this will be fixed?

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bram85

Professional

Posts: 948

Location: Eindhoven

Occupation: Software Engineer

Thursday, December 21st 2006, 1:31pm

KDE does not maintain sound drivers.

Bram Schoenmakers
KDE Netherlands (www.kde.nl)

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smithxi

Trainee

Posts: 81

Thursday, December 21st 2006, 3:52pm

and distros supposedly do?

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ipspeł

Beginner

Posts: 40

Thursday, December 21st 2006, 4:15pm

If you think it's the distro, then boot from a live CD of another one and see if it makes a difference. Most probably this is a configuration issue that is not KDE related. Shut down KDE and try playing from the command line if you are in doubt.

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smithxi

Trainee

Posts: 81

Thursday, December 21st 2006, 4:31pm

I've tried all the fixes, and none have worked. The distros I've tried so far are Fedora Core 6, Kubuntu Edgy, and Kubuntu Feisty, which I'm on now. The furthest I've gotten is this webpage...

http://opensrc.org/alsa/index.php?page=intel8x0

I'm a bit lost in terms of what to text edit, but I do understand that page, and have tried most of what they say, BUT still I get pops, popping, click, and crackles. To me this is Linux's/KDE's only flaw.

I also tried to install FreeBSD, but got lost when I tried to make the NVidia driver. (last night)

I even tried to install some custom made OSS driver for the chipset, but it did not work.

Again, playing from command line produces the same errors.

This post has been edited 5 times, last edit by "smithxi" (Dec 21st 2006, 4:37pm)

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ipspeł

Beginner

Posts: 40

Thursday, December 21st 2006, 9:48pm

Please post the console output of

mplayer -ao alsa asoundfile.mp3

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smithxi

Trainee

Posts: 81

Friday, December 22nd 2006, 1:48am

mplayer is not installed, and not in my repositories.

this does not work with kmplayer.

This post has been edited 1 times, last edit by "smithxi" (Dec 22nd 2006, 1:48am)

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ipspeł

Beginner

Posts: 40

Tuesday, December 26th 2006, 1:54pm

KMPlayer uses xine as the backend. Try to find MPlayer and KPlayer packages for your distro, that is the best combination that exists for playing stuff.

More things that would be interesting to see:

cat /proc/asound/cards
cat /proc/asound/devices
cat /proc/asound/modules
cat /proc/devices
cat /proc/interrupts
cat /proc/iomem
cat /proc/ioports
cat /proc/modules

But since your problem is more likely ALSA or hardware related, you may have more luck asking on ALSA related mailing lists or IRC channels. We may not have enough knowledge on ALSA on this board...

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smithxi

Trainee

Posts: 81

Tuesday, December 26th 2006, 3:45pm

I have used KPlayer, and the same error occurs. I've also gone into the IRC chats a lot and have gone on some long discussions and troubleshooting routines without any fixes. Most admins in the channel do not know what the problem is. I'm hoping KDE4 has a fix for this. This web site is the furthest I've gotten in my research related to this problem...

http://opensrc.org/alsa/index.php?page=intel8x0

the fixes seem hard, and I don't really know what I'm doing yet.

This post has been edited 2 times, last edit by "smithxi" (Dec 26th 2006, 3:50pm)

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