July 29, 2009

Pulse Audio 'glitch-free' in Karmic

If you're running Ubuntu Karmic Koala (the up-coming 9.10 testing release) and you recently did a dist-upgrade, you may have noticed your sound is fubar. I did lastnight, and fairly quickly that all was not right with my sound.

I did the normal trouble-shooting things (going through sound properties, making sure the modules were loading, etc.) and nothing changed. SO, I did some googling and came-up empty-handed. As a last ditch, I joined #ubuntu+1 on Freenode and was instructed me to enable the 'glitch-free' setting in Pulse. This enables pulse to dynamically load modules as needed.

I made the change to 'glitch-free' and logged-off and back on again and sound worked for everything! w00t!

To enable 'glitch-free', you need to edit /etc/pulse/default.pa and search for the line that ends "tsched=0" and change the "0" to a "1".

One other note is that under the "Sound" dialog there is a new tab called "Applications" which allows you to adjust the volume levels PER APPLICATION! This is brilliant, but I believe the default mode is for applications to be muted. SO, if after enabling 'glitch-free' you're still having issues, try looking there and adjusting the volume levels for the app in question.

2 comments:

Andrew said...

Does this still work? I am having difficulties but cannot find the flag tsched.

Could you post a copy of the entire line -- or even better the pa file

Thanks

C.J. Steele said...

Actually, I have since completely abandoned PulseAudio as it just continued to suck too badly. I'm using straight ALSA now.