Crackling and delayed sound after upgrading to 18.04

Question

I just upgraded to 18.04, and I noticed that the sound from my headphones, whether plugged into front or back port, was very crackling and slow/delayed. This issue didn't exist on 17.04/10. It also doesn't affect audio coming from HDMI via Radeon 560 GPU, just the headphone/onboard audio. The relevant device is:

00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H HD Audio (rev 31)

I tried a bunch of fixes for pulseaudio I found googling, including this one and this one. Neither of which helped.

I have found something that at least makes it listenable - changing "default-fragment-size-msec" from 25 to 5 in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf. It makes it much much better, but still a little crackly from time to time.

I've googled for 30 min or more now, and not finding anything else that seems recent and relevant, so wondering if I should maybe open a bug, or if there's something I'm overlooking here.

score 53 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 21 '19 at 12:59

53

I had the same problem. It seems related to speech-dispatcher (some text-to-speech utility).
try :

killall speech-dispatcher

If the sound comes back to normal you can remove it completely (if you don't need it) with :

sudo apt-get remove speech-dispatcher

answered Mar 21 '19 at 12:59

Bithur

631

3

This solved the issue for me on Debian Buster. In my case it was only needed as dependency of orca which I don't use. – lifeofguenter Jun 20 '19 at 17:30
1

Same as lifeofguenter – TheFiddlerWins Jul 18 '19 at 23:19
2

this fixed it for me, ubuntu 20.04/pop!os 20.04 – Tim Richardson Aug 23 '20 at 06:16
1

this solved my problem on ubuntu 20.04 – csenga Sep 28 '20 at 14:58
1

Yup, that was it. The bug would present when my audio output was switching. – ppetraki Jan 29 '21 at 17:13
A wow.. that fixed it.. I'm soo grateful, fixed my audio issues on Xubuntu 21.04!! – mevdschee Jun 21 '21 at 00:52
I noticed the issue after restarting my computer. I have a few audio device to choose from and on startup, the wrong one is select ( i know how to fix this ) anywhoo.. killing pulse audio in ubuntu 21.04 fixed it. – Begui Jul 09 '21 at 19:09
Yes, finally fixed - thank you so much! At least the devs are aware of the issue: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/speech-dispatcher/+bug/1736222 – Philipp Wrann Oct 29 '21 at 08:36
You are a lifesaver, this also resolved it for me on Xubuntu 20.04! – AetherUnbound May 23 '22 at 17:34

score 32 · Answer 2 · edited Jan 06 '19 at 05:38

32

I had the same issue and killing pulseaudio fixed it for me. I'm not sure why it would get into a bad state, but restarting pulseaudio might be something to try.

Try

killall pulseaudio

edited Jan 06 '19 at 05:38

Pablo Bianchi

15,657

answered May 08 '18 at 22:08

Tommy

321

This is some dark magic. Any idea on what's actually going on? (this works though, I think may be connected to suspend-awake process) – jave.web Jan 07 '21 at 16:55
After upgrade to 22.04, I had the sound cracking randomly. This answer help me fix the issue. – r0ng Apr 28 '22 at 04:53

score 26 · Answer 3 · edited Apr 19 '22 at 01:35

26

Press Ctrl+Alt+T to go to a terminal and use your favourite editor to edit the file

nano /etc/pulse/default.pa

then find a line containing:

load-module module-udev-detect

modify this to become:

load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

save and exit. Restart your computer or run:

pulseaudio -k

and you're all set!

edited Apr 19 '22 at 01:35

Gert Sønderby

103

answered Jul 01 '18 at 08:33

H360

369

4

you need to restart your laptop or run: pulseaudio -k after you change the configuration. – stason Nov 16 '18 at 03:05
all it does is makes the sound completely distorted – Display Name Nov 16 '18 at 13:12
2

This is the solution and it should be the accepted answer -- although it would be good to edit it and add the pulseaudio -k command – Merc Feb 15 '19 at 08:59
5

An explanation about what exactly this does would be helpful.
It can be found at this Ask Ubuntu question
– polynomial_donut Jun 04 '19 at 19:09
actually, on a newer ubuntu version this actually works. – Display Name Nov 01 '19 at 11:33
Note that my XPS laptop, tsched=1 is the solution for the internal audio chipset, but I checked too that with some USB audio sound cards, tsched=0 is better. So don't forget to test both, depending on your audio chipset. – ttoine Jan 07 '20 at 16:34
This actually fixed Android Emulator freezing up my laptop while using Spotify. Whenever two programs where trying to access the soundcard, the audio would began to crackle, delay and sound like with static. Then, while Android Studio would sync the app with the Emulator while another program was using the audio, the audio would hiccup and everything would begin to slow down until halt. Writing this comment for another poor soul that can't build/test his app due unknown reasons. – Sdlion Feb 03 '21 at 01:01
This helped me thank you – Gloat Mar 19 '21 at 04:00

score 3 · Answer 4 · edited Feb 12 '19 at 09:56

3

I ran into the same issue (crackling sound) today on Ubuntu 18.10 on my Intel NUC Canyon Hades.

killall pulseaudio

only fixed it temporarily for some reason. After a few minutes the problem was back again.

What ultimately did the trick was the answer posted by Fabby in combination with the comment by statson to enter

pulseaudio -k

edited Feb 12 '19 at 09:56

Claire

148
6

answered Jan 05 '19 at 15:41

Roman Kaufmann

31

I think when you kill PulseAudio, the OS falls back to ALSA. Most likely your PulseAudio has some configuration issues. – user31389 Dec 15 '19 at 14:17

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Apr 11 '22 at 17:29

No matter what I did, I didn't get it to work with Pulseaudio (I'm using a Focusrite Scarlett USB Audio Interface)

I followed the steps from this link and use PipeWire - instantly everything works like a charm!

https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-pipewire-on-ubuntu-linux

score -3 · Answer 6 · answered Mar 09 '19 at 02:26

-3

If you have Firefox or Chrome open when the sound starts distorting. Shut them browsers down and test the sound again. If it has stopped, then you need to use a different web browser. I installed Vivaldi yesterday and I haven't had a problem since. There are many browsers to choose from.

answered Mar 09 '19 at 02:26

Magnus Colt

1

Or... Go to about:config in Firefox and search for "media.webspeech.synth.enabled" and set it to "false" (double clicking on the entry should do it) then close Firefox. Open it again and see if that makes audio better. For me it did. – mevdschee Jun 21 '21 at 01:40

Crackling and delayed sound after upgrading to 18.04

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