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.
Nope, didn’t work for me. Have 11.10.
Hi Bo,
I’m sorry to hear that it didn’t work. I understand that can be frustrating, since I spent a good bit of time poking around and getting annoyed myself. If I run across anything that seems promising, I’ll update this post.
Note that doing this will turn off PulseAudio timer scheduling. See here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Audio/PositionReporting
Superb this worked perfectly for my Acer Aspire one 522 with Ubuntu 12.04!
Glad if it helped, even all this time later.
Ubuntu 13.10 still works <3
Didn’t work for me Ubuntu 14.4 Svr: killed all sound nearly broke Pulse – be careful implementing this fix!