undefined | Better HN

0 pointswffurr2mo ago0 comments

>> some sound issues

Is this 1998? Linux is forever having sound issues. Why is sound so hard?

0 comments

Sound (oss, alsa, pulseaudio, pipewire...), bluetooth, WiFi are eternal problematic Linux paper cuts.

As always It is Not Linux Fault, but it is Linux Problem.

It's one of the reasons why I moved to OSX + Linux virtual machine. I get the best of both worlds. Plus, the hardware quality of a 128GB unified RAM MacBookPro M4 Max is way beyond anything else in the market.

ndiddy2mo ago

I think the situation has flipped in the past few years. Since Pipewire came out, I haven't had any problems with audio on Linux and I can dial the latency down to single-digit ms. Meanwhile, on Mac audio has gotten far worse, especially since Tahoe. The latency is tens of ms and I get crackling and skipping when there's high CPU usage.

josephg2mo ago

Audio is still broken pretty regularly in davinci resolve on Linux. Sometimes I need to restart the application to make audio work. And I can’t record sound within resolve at all.

It doesn’t help that they only officially support rocky Linux. I use mint. I assume there’s some magic pipewire / alsa / pulseaudio commands I can run that would glue everything together properly. But I can’t figure it out. It just seems so complicated.

1 more reply

mikkupikku2mo ago

In some games I get a crackle in the audio which I don't get through any native application, nor some games run with proton. I don't know if that's what he means, but it hasn't bothered me enough to figure it out. I use bluetooth headphones anyway, I'm relatively insensitive to audio fidelity.

xobs2mo ago

If you run pw-top, you might see errors accumulating. This is usually due to an underrun from the game requesting an audio quantum that’s too low.

The fix is:

    mkdir -p ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d && echo "context.properties = {default.clock.min-quantum = 1024}" | tee ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/pipewire.conf

Basically, just force the quantum to be higher. Often it defaults to 64, which is around 1ms.

Zardoz842mo ago

The problem is games over Wine/Proton doing weird things with the sound. Not the sound itself on modern Linux. Heck, I have less issues using audio stuff, or just changing the audio volume on Linux than on the crappy Windows.

Verdex2mo ago

Linux sound is fine at least for me. The problem is running Windows games in proton. Sound will suddenly stop, then come back delayed. Apparently a known issue on some systems.

vablings2mo ago

Pipewire + lowlatency kernel fixes 99% sound issues

hulitu2mo ago

> Why is sound so hard?

Because they keep "updating" it every couple of years. Though, "updating" in latest years, meant just adding additional layers on top of ALSA. SW design and engineering is hard.

bmicraft2mo ago

To be fair, you can have sound issues on windows too. It's not usually on issue on linux anymore either though.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse