Bad Sound Quality


EvilDragon said:
ALSA is a pain to get it to run properly.
However, most of the times, it should work just fine.
WiFi disabled? Sometimes WiFi can interfere with audio.

What apps have that problem? All of them?

I don't have any sound problems on my Pandora except for VERY slight crackling in MPlayer (which goes away when I change the buffersize)
Click to expand...

Has OSS4 been tried by anyone?
 
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I tried setting the buffers to ridiculously high amounts... didn't change. I'm restarting to see if that will make the changes "come into effect"
 
Hi there!

I cannot see your video file but from what you say it seems I'm not the only one with this crackling sound problem. My pandora I got today has the same problem.. but I may got some hints for you:

With my pandora came 2 other pandoras that play sound flawlessly, always. I played around with the sound and it seems that it's a random chance if sound works or not with my Pandora: when running a webradio station via Exaile, the sound crackles and seems like 200% too loud and therefor distored. After I cancel the radio stream and reconnect right after, there is a chance that the sound playback suddely works! The same thing is true for ZSNES emulator and super Mario World: after several retries (kill emulator and restart emulator) the sound playback works. After restarting again it may not work anymore so you'll have to retry until the sound is ok again.
In the meantime I didn't change anything: neither volume nor any other settings!

It seems that there is a problem with some kind of sound initialization? When sound finally works nicely it stays that way perfectly until you quit your program and run another program with sound. Than everything start anew.

So: it is NO SOLUTION to just turn down the sound, the crackling is reduced, but so is the sound.


Is there a way to reinstall the sound drivers maybe?
 
I have been investigating the issue all night, and my conclusion is that what we are seeing with sound (and sometimes nub parameter) settings changing and getting in 'inoperable' states, is due to a bit of beta/buggy software on the part of the porters .. so far.

It seems like not properly closing things seems to upset the Pandora nub and audio driver systems, the use of which is currently still being properly explored. I know for sure its possible to get the nubs all out of shape and leave the unusable .. in software .. so in my opinion things are just not quite robust enough yet.

This will change.

The thing is we have to really consider ourselves at BETA level with the OS .. as there has been a dirth of hardware running the released OS, very little has been properly tested.

The point is, give it time. We can all work on sorting out things and reporting the problems so things improve.
 
The audio in that video definitely sounds like clipping. The lower and louder sounds in the music are crackly, but the high pitched and softer sounds are not.
You should be able to load the alsa mixer and just keep turning down the volume until it is good again. I don't understand why this hasn't worked for you.
 
WizardStan said:
The audio in that video definitely sounds like clipping. The lower and louder sounds in the music are crackly, but the high pitched and softer sounds are not.
You should be able to load the alsa mixer and just keep turning down the volume until it is good again. I don't understand why this hasn't worked for you.
Click to expand...

That solution is a bit like: "ah, you got these strange stripes all over your new plasma television display.. just turn it darker until you don't see the stripes anymore; don't worry if you don't get a picture with these settings anymore, at least the stripes are gone" :)

And as I said: one moment the sound is fine, after restarting the sound emitting program it's crackling sound all over again. Without changing any other settings like volume.
 
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torpor said:
I have been investigating the issue all night, and my conclusion is that what we are seeing with sound (and sometimes nub parameter) settings changing and getting in 'inoperable' states, is due to a bit of beta/buggy software on the part of the porters .. so far.
Click to expand...
There seems to be problems with the ALSA driver or ALSA itself, it sometimes gets into bad state and keeps replaying same samples over and over again, ignoring any new input.. (that's why stopping/resuming playback sometimes helps).
Unfortunately it's difficult to fix, and ALSA has some really poor code in it (look at sound/core/pcm_lib.c in kernel tree for an example), although ASoC/OMAP parts of ALSA are quite good and maybe they can be tuned to work with remaining ALSA code better.
 
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notaz said:
torpor said:
I have been investigating the issue all night, and my conclusion is that what we are seeing with sound (and sometimes nub parameter) settings changing and getting in 'inoperable' states, is due to a bit of beta/buggy software on the part of the porters .. so far.
Click to expand...
There seems to be problems with the ALSA driver or ALSA itself, it sometimes gets into bad state and keeps replaying same samples over and over again, ignoring any new input.. (that's why stopping/resuming playback sometimes helps).
Unfortunately it's difficult to fix, and ALSA has some really poor code in it (look at sound/core/pcm_lib.c in kernel tree for an example), although ASoC/OMAP parts of ALSA are quite good and maybe they can be tuned to work with remaining ALSA code better.
Click to expand...
Is there a stable and "always working" alternative to ALSA? ^^" I'm not into Linux but I wonder that Linux useres still have to deal with some basic OS/Driver stuff that should be working since Linux became an real alternative to Windows years ago.
 
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zapman said:
That solution is a bit like: "ah, you got these strange stripes all over your new plasma television display.. just turn it darker until you don't see the stripes anymore; don't worry if you don't get a picture with these settings anymore, at least the stripes are gone" :)
Click to expand...
No, it's definitely not like that, that's not how audio clipping works at all. It'd be more like "ah, your brand new television is way too bright and it's hard to distinguish colours? Your brightness level may be set way too high for some reason. Try turning it down until it is normal again. Maybe contrast as well."
 
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WizardStan said:
zapman said:
That solution is a bit like: "ah, you got these strange stripes all over your new plasma television display.. just turn it darker until you don't see the stripes anymore; don't worry if you don't get a picture with these settings anymore, at least the stripes are gone" :)
Click to expand...
No, it's definitely not like that, that's not how audio clipping works at all. It'd be more like "ah, your brand new television is way too bright and it's hard to distinguish colours? Your brightness level may be set way too high for some reason. Try turning it down until it is normal again. Maybe contrast as well."
Click to expand...
No, it's definitely not like that, that's not how a retort works at all. It'd be more like, "ah, your analogy wasn't very good, so here is a better one. Add an air of snarkiness for good measure. Maybe throw in a smiley to cloud the motive."
 
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sinoth said:
WizardStan said:
zapman said:
That solution is a bit like: "ah, you got these strange stripes all over your new plasma television display.. just turn it darker until you don't see the stripes anymore; don't worry if you don't get a picture with these settings anymore, at least the stripes are gone" :)
Click to expand...
No, it's definitely not like that, that's not how audio clipping works at all. It'd be more like "ah, your brand new television is way too bright and it's hard to distinguish colours? Your brightness level may be set way too high for some reason. Try turning it down until it is normal again. Maybe contrast as well."
Click to expand...
No, it's definitely not like that, that's not how a retort works at all. It'd be more like, "ah, your analogy wasn't very good, so here is a better one. Add an air of snarkiness for good measure. Maybe throw in a smiley to cloud the motive."
Click to expand...
But I wasn't going for a snarky retort. I'm trying to help. :(
Why you gotta be so mean?
 
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WizardStan said:
But I wasn't going for a snarky retort. I'm trying to help. :(
Why you gotta be so mean?
Click to expand...
Haha, I couldn't help it! I see a reply phrased after another reply and well... maybe I have a problem >_>

As far as crackling sound, I can crank my volume knob all the way up and mixer volume to 100% and don't hear crackling (using MPlayer). Maybe I need to dig up some louder mp3s...
 
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Just reflashed and it seems to take a long time to boot... waiting... waiting...
 
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