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Fixing the Crackle and Pop in Ubuntu Sound

So, as I blogged previously, I’ve been re-appropriating some old PCs and sticking Ubuntu 11.10 on them. I had one doing exactly what I wanted it to do in the context of my home automation network with one small but annoying exception. Whenever I would play music through headphones or speakers, there would be a crackling noise. A google search turned up a lot of stuff that I had to weed through, but ultimately, this is what did the trick:

I opened /etc/pulse/default.pa and found the line

load-module module-udev-detect

This was located in an “ifexists” clause. It should be replaced by this:

load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

From there, reboot. I can’t speak to whether this will fix everyone’s crackle or just some people’s, and I can’t speak to why this setting isn’t enabled by default, but c’est la vie. This is what did the trick for me, and hopefully it fixes the problem for someone else as well.

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Bo
Bo
12 years ago

Nope, didn’t work for me. Have 11.10.

dryphi
dryphi
12 years ago

Note that doing this will turn off PulseAudio timer scheduling. See here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Audio/PositionReporting

Christiaan
Christiaan
11 years ago

Superb this worked perfectly for my Acer Aspire one 522 with Ubuntu 12.04!

Erik Dietrich
11 years ago
Reply to  Christiaan

Glad if it helped, even all this time later.

Juzandapuss
Juzandapuss
10 years ago

Ubuntu 13.10 still works <3

Bill
Bill
9 years ago
Reply to  Juzandapuss

Didn’t work for me Ubuntu 14.4 Svr: killed all sound nearly broke Pulse – be careful implementing this fix!