Crackling in the speakers KD Plasma

Desktop Environments Plasma
1

Since my last reinstallation of EOS Plasma, whenever I want to play sound of any kind, I first have a crackling in the speakers. I am using PulseAudio 15.0.

2

Is it using any specific programs?

Is it crackling and popping or is it a constant noise even when nothing is playing?

Also is it onboard audio or a soundcard/usb sound device

3

It’s a crackle. It always happens when I play an audio source first, e.g. music player, audio stream in broweser, youtube etc. It is an old onboard chip of an equally old processor (878).

4

Try Pipewire.

5

ok your buffers might need to be tweaked if you wish to continue using pulseaudio.

I might recommend pipewire like @Kresimir though as it uses much less CPU and handles buffers better than pulse. Itll likely do much better on your system if its older.

6

How do I do that exactly? I’ve read several times here that people were annoyed and wanted to go back to PulseAudio.

7

Update your system and install pipewire-pulse:

sudo pacman -Syu pipewire-pulse

Depending on your specific use cases, you may need to install additional packages, but most likely not.

Sure, but I’ve read many, many more times that people think PulseAudio sucks.

1 Like
8

What will then happen to the customizations I made in
/etc/pulse/daemon.conf
for PulseAudio? Are they obsolete then?
And do I still need to activate Piwire and assign the sound card? Should I uninstall PulseAudio after that?

9

You don’t need to do anything. Installing pipewire-pulse replaces pulseaudio (if you look at your installed packages list, with pacman -Q, it is no longer installed).

10

thx @Kresimir, I will try that tomorrow :yawning_face:

11

Pulseaudio will be replaced automatically, you can do custom configurations in ~/.config/pipewire

Here is info on it here

you can set custom buffers in the pipewire alsa conf and the pipewire conf files. There is a lot you can do with it and it actually makes doing loopbacks and such really easy and Ive enjoyed using it since my switch many months ago.

12

That means the /etc/pulse/daemon.conf could be deleted or at least reset, or the complete folder /etc/pulse/ could be deleted?

13

It should remove them automatically so you dont need to worry about it :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: even if it leaves a couple files they wont have any effect.

14

Last question: what can I do to get back to PulseAudio in case of problems (sound broken, nerves broken …)? I do not really trust Timeshift in such situations :wink: .

15

uninstall pipewire and reinstall pulseaudio should be all youd need to do

1 Like
16

I did and so far PipeWire is running unexcited. However, it sounds a bit thinner to me compared to PulseAudio. I’m looking for the files to at least improve the global sample rate and resample quality. With PulseAudio I had the following settings:

resample-method = speex-float-5
default-sample-format = float24le
default-sample-rate = 441000
alternate-sample-rate = 48000

resample-method = speex-float- 10 I had before, after changing it to 5 the cracking became less.

Where can I do the equivalent for PipeWire?

Edit: The file which is needed for this (/etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf) does not exist for me.

17

In the meantime, it crackles just the same with PipeWire. Before this comes: Yes, plugs are all tight :wink:

18

The files for pipewire are all in /usr/share/pipewire, just copy them to your config folder, I use ~/.config/pipewire. Most people dont need to configure it so no config files get made.

1 Like
19

hmmm…idk then, if youre still crackling its gotta be something other than pulse or pipewire :man_shrugging:

cant be certain without physically testing it :thinking:

20

I can only say one thing at the moment: currently I’m using Manjaro KDE again and there the sound is exactly as it should be (still with PulseAudio). I don’t have the necessary knowledge to evaluate this in more detail …