Adjust for Audacious drop-outs?

[John Hupp]

On 5/21/2015 1:24 PM, John Hupp wrote:
> On 5/21/2015 12:58 PM, Aere Greenway wrote:
>> On 05/21/2015 10:04 AM, John Hupp wrote:
>>> Running Audacious with JACK looks like it solves the dropout 
>>> behavior (though I have not tested it on the fat clients yet), but I 
>>> see that JACK and PulseAudio don't get along well together, 
>>> especially on a machine with only one sound device: 
>>> http://jackaudio.org/faq/pulseaudio_and_jack.html
>>>
>>> So for a general-purpose desktop it looks like it would be much 
>>> better if I could get things working with PulseAudio.
>> John:
>>
>> I use VLC a fair amount, and I have not yet encountered the 
>> up-to-minutes-long dropouts of the problem reported.
>>
>> When I don't have JACK running, I use VLC.
>>
>> I use Audacious a lot, practicing improvising music along with audio 
>> files, and I use JACK because my music software needs the low-latency 
>> it provides.
>>
>> I installed PulseAudio on my machines because the Java configuration 
>> for (all) Ubuntu (variants) presumes PulseAudio is present (for the 
>> Java Sound (Gervill) synthesizer).
>>
>> On low-spec machines, the Java Sound Synthesizer won't work, but on 
>> those same machines, Qsynth (using JACK) works fine.
>>
>> I just thought about something that may be helping me 
>> (configuration-wise) that you probably don't have.
>>
>> In the "/etc/security/limits.d" directory, I have a file named 
>> "aere.conf" (my user name is aere).  Its name and contents are 
>> user-name dependent.  In my case, its contents are:
>>
>> aere - rtprio 85
>> aere - memlock unlimited
>>
>> I created this file at the suggestion of the Fluidsynth developers, 
>> to allow Fluidsynth (Qsynth) to work on low-spec machines, and when I 
>> made this configuration change, it made a major positive difference.
>>
>> I don't know if it has any affect on the Audacious audio drop-outs, 
>> but is permanently in my system.
>>
>
> The minutes-long dropouts only occur in VLC when it is run on a fat 
> client.  It's A-OK on a standalone.
>
> When I installed qjackctl, debconf popped up a question about whether 
> I wanted to set up realtime priority (involving 
> /etc/security/limits.d), but the help note said that it was a bad idea 
> in a multi-user environment because jack could monopolize all 
> available physical memory -- and a multi-user environment is what I 
> have in this case.
>
> Concerning your note that you installed PulseAudio: I recall that it 
> was not installed by default in earlier releases, but I think it is in 
> 14.04 -- unless I picked it up as dependency for something else I 
> installed.
>
> Before I resort to one of the exercises to try to make JACK and 
> PulseAudio coexist, I would like to continue trying to make PulseAudio 
> work better.  I return to the thought that VLC works fine on a 
> standalone without JACK, presumably using PulseAudio, though I suppose 
> it could be using ALSA directly.  So I'm likewise hoping that 
> Audacious + PulseAudio can work well for me on this hardware.
>
> But just going a step farther into the JACK + PulseAudio scenario, do 
> you just run JACK manually as needed via qjackctl, or have you 
> implemented one of the coexistence options outlined at 
> http://jackaudio.org/faq/pulseaudio_and_jack.html?

An interesting article here that offers tweaks: 
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/pulseaudio-an-achilles-heel-that-needs-repair/