[Bug 476652] [NEW] sound stops and begins clicking and popping

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Binary package hint: pulseaudio

In 9.04 my sound was working just fine, and I performed an in place upgrade to 9.10 from update manager.
After the upgrade, when I play anything (audio or video) it will play for a short while then stop and the sound will just turn to clicks and pops (not stuttering really as others report). When this happens I notice that the "pulseaudio" process starts eating all cpu time, even for a short while after I close the app I was using for playback.

The problem seems worse when using Totem for playback (or perhaps more specifically Gstreamer since Miro has the same problem and it uses gstreamer too) rather than my usual SMPlayer (mplayer backend). The same problem is there in both but it typically takes longer for it to trigger in smplayer and I can usually recover in smplayer by pausing for a few seconds and doing a seek back or forwards which is not usually possible in totem or miro.
Symptoms when playing video are that the video freezes (possibly due to the aforementioned pulseaudio cpu hogging) although in smplayer sometimes picture will continue (jerkily) while sound devolves into the clicks and pops.
In totem I notice that the play counter (elapsed time) will start racing forward very quickly, a few seconds after sound stops.
I also use the application Spotify via Wine and this happens there too, but will usually recover after a few seconds of clicking and popping (the same pulseaudio process cpu spike occurs during this time).

audio hardware is:
0 [CMI8738 ]: CMI8738 - C-Media CMI8738
C-Media CMI8738 (model 37) at 0xa400, irq 10

pulseaudio:
  Installed: 1:0.9.19-0ubuntu4

I'm attaching a pulseaudio log gathered while I was watching a video in
which this problem occurred.

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


** Tags: apport-collected
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sound stops and begins clicking and popping
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/bugs/476652
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