Fedora 9 - sound playback stutters

genci · #1 26th May 2008, 09:27 AM

Hi all,

I've just done a clean upgrade to Fedora 9 and while I have sound working, I've noticed that playing back mp3's and videos (avi) the sound stutters every few seconds. It does this in a variety of apps eg VLC, Xine, Amarok. I tried this in KDE and Gnome without any improvement. Listening to videos with sound in Firefox work without this stutter.

Any ideas?

Thanks

A.Serbinski · #2 26th May 2008, 05:28 PM

Make sure that you configure xine to use pulseaudio -- you'll need to install "xine-lib-pulseaudio", then when you go into the setup window for xine and select the "audio" tab, you'll be able to select pulseaudio as the audio driver.

genci · #3 27th May 2008, 06:50 AM

I've done that and got no sound at all from the mp3. I have now changed the xine audio driver back to "auto" and there still isn't any sound. It definitely still plays and stutters in VLC and amarok so I must have been wrong before when I said it played/stuttered in xine.

ruckus · #4 27th May 2008, 12:29 PM

I am having a similar problem after just upgrading to F9. The sound stutters in amarok and xine but is also too fast in mplayer and flash. For example a 6 second clip plays in about 5.8seconds (using the command:

Code:

time paplay /usr/share/sounds/KDE_Logout_new.wav

I don't think the issue is with PulseAudio because using ALSA directly also has the same result:

Code:

pasuspender -- mplayer -ao alsa /usr/share/sounds/KDE_Logout_new.wav

Have you experienced this speed-up?

ruckus

genci · #5 28th May 2008, 08:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ruckus

I am having a similar problem after just upgrading to F9. The sound stutters in amarok and xine but is also too fast in mplayer and flash. For example a 6 second clip plays in about 5.8seconds (using the command:

Code:

time paplay /usr/share/sounds/KDE_Logout_new.wav

Not that I've noticed.

Code:

$ time paplay /usr/share/sounds/KDE_Logout_new.wav  
real	0m6.130s 
user	0m0.008s 
sys	0m0.020s

I've seen other threads on sound playing back like chipmunks on helium, so maybe your issue is partially related to that?

daniel.j.laird · #6 28th May 2008, 08:18 AM

I too have done an upgrade of Fc8->fc9 and am having audio stutters on all playback (no music for now then). I have tried all sorts of things with the pulse audio daemon.conf file with no luck.
I searched on google and found some BUGS of XINE backend and audio stutters and it appears that a kernel upgrade might solve it so we might have to wait until a new kernel is made available.
Dan

genci · #7 28th May 2008, 09:40 AM

I see there is another thread on stuttering with the Xine engine.

The two bugzilla reports here and here discuss it.

At least I'm not alone with it.

ruckus · #8 28th May 2008, 03:12 PM

As discussed above I may be having a different problem but just for your information, I think I have fixed the speed and stuterring issues on my machine.

I added the following to the kernel arguments on the GRUB boot screen:

Code:

nohz=off highres=off

I got these from this page.

Might be worth giving a try. You can also add the arguments directly into the file /etc/grub.conf

ruckus

eddieedwards · #9 15th August 2008, 03:30 PM

I'd like to add a "me too" here. I recently installed F9 after running F8 on this Vaio laptop. Sound worked without a hitch there, so it's not a hardware issue. I tried adding the nohz=off and highres=off arguments to my kernel args, but that didn't help. (My mouse is jerky at times, too, so I wonder if it is related--probably "just" a USB issue tho.).

I *did* find this in dmesg, but not sure if it related:
ALSA sound/pci/ac97/ac97_codec.c:2152: MC'97 1 converters and GPIO not ready (0xff00)

delarius · #10 14th April 2009, 08:49 AM

Hi,
New to the forums here, well new to posting anyways.
I've been working on this very issue myself, and seem to have found a solution that works for me.
I installed the alsa-driver.i386 via yum, which will also pull down an alsa-kmdl-* dependancy.
I had to enable atrpms to get this (could have installed via rpm but yum is so much more efficient.)
After a reboot, and it's much better. No more stuttering! The only minor downside is the audio does a brief rush right off the start when watching videos, for a second or two, then it all seems to settle down and looks and sounds fine.
Hope this is helpful to someone else, as it's been a challenging evening trying to get this annoying situation resolved.
Be well,
Del