Audio Issue

Khrona

Hello there!

I have been using Solus Budgie for almost a year and a half now, and there is this one audio issue that I constantly have that I can't seem to fix whatsoever.

Every now and then my headset audio becomes heavily distorted with constant crackling audio and any voice sounding deep and robotic, in fact, it even happened while writing this post, when I started playing a YouTube video. I don't know what is causing it, but changing the volume level with my headset wheel, opening the Audio Settings via the sound taskbar icon or entering a voice chat on Discord fixes it for the time being. Sometimes it also fixes itself after a few seconds or minutes. I also noticed that staying connected to a Discord voice chat prevents this from happening, and it doesn't happen if there is any type of sound being played normally, only when there is no sound. It also happens when the notification sound pops up, where it gets really distorted too.

I have tried a few fixes already, like the tsched=0 and messing with some PulseAudio settings to no avail. I basically just deal with it, but if there is any way for me to fix it, I would be very grateful.

My audio config:
Headset: Logitech G633 (USB)
Motherboard: ASUS PRIME Z370-A

sgvd

I have no one fix to solve it, but as I had this issue as well, I noted down some possible solution found from all over the interwebz. Simply restarting pulseaudio with pulseaudio -k fixes it temporarely, although it can be annoying to apply if you encounter it in-game and the game doesn't handle alt-tabbing well.
My own noise issues similar to yours were solved by doing the firefox changes.

Firefox:
If it only occurs when firefox is running, try the following

Disable in Firefox media.webspeech.synth.enabled
Disable in Firefox reader.parse-on-load.enabled

Wine:
If it happens when starting a game under wine, try the following

Possible fix: delete ~/.config/pulse/*-stream-volumes.tdb and reboot
Workaround: reboot pulseaudio with pulseaudio -k when it occurs. Some wine games will crash or controller can stop working when accessing a terminal from in-game, even when accessed without alt-tabbing.

Generic:
Last resort stuff

Disabling time-based scheduling is used for older hardware, shouldn't really have to do this/etc/pulse/default.pa add string tsched=0 after the module load-module module-udev-detect
Alternatively, there is some speechrequester service that you can kill which may also help, but I am not finding it in my notes, so cannot be sure.

Khrona

sgvd Unfortunately, I have already tried disabling these settings on Firefox, and also tried the tsched=0 before, to no avail, but I will try again as I recently formatted my PC and didn't apply these settings again, except for disabling the webspeech one. I also haven't experienced this issue while playing games, be it native or with Wine/Proton, it seems to only happen in my Desktop/browsing the web.

I forgot to mention on the original post, but I think this might be Firefox related (at least the frequency of it), as I was using Opera for a short period of time to see how far it had come since the last time I tried it years ago, and during this time, the sound problem only happened once or twice, in the spam of almost a month, while with Firefox, this happens anywhere from 1 to 3, 4 or even more times a day.

For the speechrequester service you mentioned, I looked for it a while back because I saw some people saying it could be why the problem was happening, and while indeed it appeared sometimes, it never appeared when the audio got distorted, only a few times at random and didn't seem to be the culprit.

Khrona

Update: after testing with Firefox options websynth and parseonload off, the issue still persists. I want to try again to use tsched=0 to see if woudl solve the problem, but it seems like I don't have the default.pa file nor the pulse folder under /etc, woud anyone know if simply creating those is fine, or should I do something else?

sgvd

Khrona
You don't have it, since it's an optional user override for the system defaults. You have to copy the default to that location and then do your changes there.
Just an FYI; for testing you can simply do your fix in /usr/share/pulseaudio/default.pa as well, no need for the other location. The only reason you want to have it in the /etc/pulse location is to make it permanent, as the original default.pa will be overridden at every pulseaudio update.

Like so:

Create the following directory if it doesn't already exist: /etc/pulse
Copy the default.pa file from /usr/share/pulseaudio to /etc/pulse
After any changes, restart with pulseaudio -k followed by pulseaudio --start or reboot

Edit: I am getting this audio issue in Budgie as well, so it has nothing to do with which DM you are running. I will check which of my fixes from my experimentation under Plasma removes the effect. It's just annoying that it's quite random, makes it hard to really pin down. Firefox, Discord, and Wine are my remaining applications that are potentially causing this. The noise only appears when one of these is started/running.

Khrona

sgvd Oh, got it, thanks! I will do that if I experience audio issues again. But fortunately, after a clean install I did yesterday to get rid of my Windows partition, I haven't experienced the audio issue again. I noticed that speech-dispatcher is running almost all the time tho, don't know if it may be why this isn't happening anymore.

Khrona

So, probably last update: I haven't experienced the audio issues for a couple of days now, I believe it is fixed.

In case anyone that gets here with these problems wander what I did differently when doing a clean install was to go to Budgie Settings > Raven > switch Allow raising volume above 100% to on and off again.

Even tho it is off by default when you install Solus Budgie, you are able to raise the volume above 100% on Raven, so switching that option to on and off disables it correctly and in my case fixes the audio issues.

Only annoying little thing is that there is a speech-dispatcher-speaker-ng audio process running almost all the time showgin in Raven, but other than that, everything is fixed now for me.

WetGeek

Khrona I believe it is fixed

I wonder if this will fix the "no sound" issue with Plasma on my dev workstation? I'll swap in the Plasma SSD and give that a try. That's the only thing that's kept me from using Plasma so far on that machine. I need to listen to music in order to concentrate while I write code, so I changed to Budgie a while ago. Budgie "just works."

sgvd

Khrona
There was a post somewhere on the forum that mentioned how to disable speechrequester. I have removed it from my own notes (since it didn't help the noise issue), so I don't remember myself.

Thanks for the tip btw, will try it myself as well and see whether it indeed prevents it from happening.

WetGeek

WetGeek I wonder if this will fix the "no sound" issue with Plasma

Bummer. I shoulda realized ... there's no Raven in Budgie.

WetGeek

WetGeek By this time, I was getting tired. Budgie is what's already running on that machine. I meant to say, "there's no Raven in Plasma."