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Sound cutoff issues

Hello! I'm pretty new to pop_os and linux, but am trying to switch over from windows. I've been having some sound issues where it seems like sounds get cut off. It seems to most noticeable with something like doing duolingo from my browser (lots of short sound clips of words and such; if I click on words quickly, then spotify playing in the background will stop playing briefly). I've tried disabling sleep, as described by https://support.system76.com/articles/audio/, without luck. I've also noticed that I see errors listed in pw-top which sometimes correspond to sounds getting cut off. That is, sometimes I notice a cutoff without seeing an increase in the number of errors, but when I notice an increase in the number of errors it usually corresponds to something getting cut off.

Is there a way to see what the errors from pw-top are? Or suggestions for other things I should look into? I've looked at dmesg and systemctl status --user pipewire.service (and pipewire-pulse) but the only error I see is a nvidia-drm thing which seems to be innocuous. I've also uploaded my alsa-info results, if that's useful.

3 comments

henfredemars

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Have you tried increasing your latency in the pipewire configuration?

I also had audio issues like you described until I set it to a more reasonable value like 512-1024. Think the documentation refers to it as the time quantum. It would appear that on my hardware it is simply not capable of the low latency defaults.

ProfessorScience

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That does seem to at least help. It seems to be harder to trigger the problems with higher values. I could still get it to happen with the quant at 2048, but I had to really work at it.

I notice that the + Firefox line seems to show up with a quant of 900 even when the minimum value is higher than that? That seems weird.

henfredemars

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I seem to recall the configuration having options that set different minimums depending on the source of audio. I’m not an expert in the settings. I kind of just tweaked them until I wasn’t seeing skips.

I do believe there’s a global minimum setting however. That might be the one you’re already using.

I think the main problem is the default settings are just not great. They are far too tight.

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