[Bug 476702] [NEW] Audio has occasional skips/dropouts

[Vanessa Ezekowitz]

Public bug reported:

I haven't been able to determine a pattern to this yet, but ever since
loading two of my machines with Karmic, I've been having audio drop-
outs.

I am *not* using Pulseaudio.

It affects all music players - Audacious, Exaile, even the command-line
'play' utility that comes with SoX - and probably other audio sources as
well.  The symptoms are simple: I get little "hiccups" in the sound now
and again, either the audio is skipping forward by some small, random
amount, like listening to a cassette player with someone tapping the
"fast forward" button now and again, or by dropping out entirely, as in
silence for a brief period.

In its worst case, audio dropped out for several *seconds*, during which
time one of the two CPU cores was pegged at 100%.

I have examined my system logs, dmesg, and watched for errors on the
command line.  I have found nothing at all except for a single clue:  On
a *completely idle* machine, SoX kept warning me of buffer underruns
while experiencing these audio hiccups:

abe at cardinal:~$ play [filename hidden]

 File Size: 1.56M     Bit Rate: 102k
  Encoding: MPEG audio    Info: 1962
  Channels: 2 @ 16-bit   Track: 6
Samplerate: 44100Hz      Album: [hidden]
Replaygain: off         Artist: [hidden]
  Duration: 00:02:01.70  Title: [hidden]

In:0.15% 00:00:00.19 [00:02:01.52] Out:4.10k [      |      ]        Clip:0    play WARN alsa: under-run
In:0.15% 00:00:00.19 [00:02:01.52] Out:4.44k [      |      ]        Clip:0    play WARN alsa: under-run
In:3.82% 00:00:04.64 [00:01:57.06] Out:218k  [    ==|==    ]        Clip:0    play WARN alsa: under-run
In:21.7% 00:00:26.38 [00:01:35.33] Out:1.26M [    -=|=-    ]        Clip:0    play WARN alsa: under-run
In:42.1% 00:00:51.27 [00:01:10.43] Out:2.45M [      |      ]        Clip:0    play WARN alsa: under-run

The machines in question both carry a Gigabyte K8U-939 mainboard with an
Athlon 64x2 3800+ processor and 1GB RAM. One machine has a Creative SB
Live! sound card, the other is using on-board audio.  Both have
reasonably fast SATA hard disks and onboard RTL-8139-based ethernet
devices.  Clearly, they have more than sufficient computing  power for
the tack at hand.

Both machines were running Jaunty before, without any problems.  Both
received a fresh install of the final/official release of Karmic - that
is, I did not "upgrade" them directly from Jaunty.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
ArecordDevices:
 **** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
 card 0: Live [Dell Sound Blaster Live!], device 0: emu10k1x [EMU10K1X Front]
   Subdevices: 1/1
   Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
CRDA: Error: [Errno 2] No such file or directory
Card0.Amixer.info:
 Card hw:0 'Live'/'Dell Sound Blaster Live! at 0xc000 irq 21'
   Mixer name	: 'SigmaTel STAC9708,11'
   Components	: 'AC97a:83847608'
   Controls      : 44
   Simple ctrls  : 26
Date: Fri Nov  6 10:45:19 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
HibernationDevice: RESUME=UUID=3454cf9f-970c-4a77-8100-686006e1475e
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release i386 (20091028.5)
IwConfig:
 lo        no wireless extensions.
 
 eth0      no wireless extensions.
 
 vboxnet0  no wireless extensions.
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: linux-image (not installed)
ProcCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-14-generic root=UUID=bd79cec3-fb97-42f9-bf27-e6cae2943847 ro crashkernel=384M-2G:64M,2G-:128M splash
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-14.48-generic
RelatedPackageVersions:
 linux-backports-modules-2.6.31-14-generic N/A
 linux-firmware 1.24
RfKill:
 
SourcePackage: linux-meta
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-14-generic i686
XsessionErrors:
 (polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1:2539): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_once_init_leave: assertion `initialization_value != 0' failed
 (xfce4-terminal:2584): Terminal-WARNING **: Unable to load terminal preferences.
 (xfce4-terminal:2584): Gdk-WARNING **: XID collision, trouble ahead
dmi.bios.date: 12/01/2005
dmi.bios.vendor: Award Software International, Inc.
dmi.bios.version: F3
dmi.board.name: M1689D
dmi.board.vendor: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
dmi.board.version: x.x
dmi.chassis.type: 3
dmi.modalias: dmi:bvnAwardSoftwareInternational,Inc.:bvrF3:bd12/01/2005:svn:pn:pvr:rvnGigabyteTechnologyCo.,Ltd.:rnM1689D:rvrx.x:cvn:ct3:cvr:

** Affects: linux-meta (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New


** Tags: apport-bug i386

-- 
Audio has occasional skips/dropouts
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/476702
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