Alsa/Pulseaudio - Some General Questions / Is it me (soundcard) or is it pulse?

Linuxembourg

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I have seen the pinned thread regarding what to do in case of no sound, and restarting pulseaudio works fine for me. As does the much longer process of rebooting that I was previously undertaking.

However I have a few related questions to alsa/pulse. I don't really want to ask on SE as there are a few questions, and some of them I suspect don't really have concrete answers. I hope I've put this in the right place.

Is it normal for the audio to drop out "now and again"? It is trivial to restart pulse, and I can live with doing that (even once a day), but does it indicate an underlying issue, or is it normal? The sound dropping out to dummy audio happens randomly afaict, sometimes even upon boot.

This random drop-out issue seems to be quite prevalent for Ubuntu based distros. Is it the case for all Linux distros?

I changed some settings in the config file, which were necessary in order to reduce stuttering to acceptable levels. I don't know if changing those settings has created the drop out issue. Previous to changing these settings stuttering was not rare and it was also illogical. Now stuttering is rare and logical (you can still make out what someone said, even if it stutters).

I added the line (without ; at the beginning):

realtime-scheduling = no

And I amended as follows:

; nice-level = -15
; default-fragments = 8
; default-fragment-size-msec = 10

Is it normal that I had to play around with the daemon.conf file to get audio working properly, or did it indicate an underlying issue?
 


I do not have a lot of time to study this further atm....But,
I have no problem with sound whatsoever.
I am running LM20.1 (Cinnamon)

You need to let the folks here know what you are running

An underlying issue....my guess would be Yes.

Is our OS up to date ?
Has your kernel updated recently ?
Do you have Timeshift installed?


I changed some settings in the config file, which were necessary in order to reduce stuttering to acceptable levels.
I have never had to anything remotely like that.
 
You need to let the folks here know what you are running

An underlying issue....my guess would be Yes.

Is our OS up to date ?
Has your kernel updated recently ?
Do you have Timeshift installed?

I am running Lubuntu 20.10. I installed it about 10 days ago. To be clear, I don't really have any issues now. I don't have timeshift running, but could easily revert to the default configuration which I saved. I didn't manually add any drivers or anything.

It is up-to-date according to discover. If the kernel updating is something that is made obvious to the user, then no it hasn't. But if it's something that happens as part of automatic updates, then I've no idea.
 
One of our Moderators, I believe runs Lubuntu.
By mentioning his name here he will be alerted to the fact that you need some help with this issue.

Be patient.

@KGIII
 
Kernel updates will look more or less like other updates and you'll most likely notice that the kernel update happened when the update has asked you to reboot afterwards. The kernel updates as a matter of course with the rest of the system, the user needs to take no special activities, beyond normal updating, to ensure the kernel gets updated.

I much, much prefer to update from the terminal. If the system pops up an update request, I just do the update in the terminal. This lets me easily see what's going on, and I can scroll up to double check anything.
 
The Kernel has definitely not updated then, as no updates have required a reboot.

I can kinda see what's going on in discover for updates, at least well within the limits of my knowledge. I find installation a bit difficult though, it just says e.g. 5mb (plus dependencies), and doesn't seem to tell me what they are or more importantly how big they are.
 
Kernel updates tend to be a couple of weeks apart. There's a slim chance that the kernel hasn't updated since you started using Linux. It doesn't take anything special to update the kernel. So, there's no need to worry. You are also new and may well have just missed it.
 
Kernel updates tend to be a couple of weeks apart. There's a slim chance that the kernel hasn't updated since you started using Linux. It doesn't take anything special to update the kernel. So, there's no need to worry. You are also new and may well have just missed it.
With rolling releases distribution you get package updates and kernel updates faster, I've had weeks with 2 new kernels maybe more here and there.
 
With rolling releases distribution you get package updates and kernel updates faster, I've had weeks with 2 new kernels maybe more here and there.

Indeed. Though the OP is using Lubuntu, which is how I ended up getting pinged to the thread.
 

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