It takes one second to start and there is some crackling with plenty of forum posts explaining how to fix these things going back to 2005 that are no longer relevant because the sound uses something with a different name now.
there is some crackling with plenty of forum posts explaining how to fix these things going back to 2005 that are no longer relevant because the sound uses something with a different name now.
This is almost always because your pipewire buffers are too small (because of the defaults erring on the side of low latency) and so when the CPU is busy the buffers empty and you get some crackling. Use pw-top to see all of your devices and sources, next to the devices you should see a number in the QUANT column. Chances are that this is really low (or 1)
You can change your minimum buffer (pipewire calculates this by setting a ‘quantum’), temporarily with :
pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.min-quantum 512
You can edit /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf and add a line under the [clocks] section:
default.clock.min-quantum = 512
Restart pipewire for the setting to take effect:
systemctl --user restart pipewire
(If your sound ever just dies for no reason, restarting pipewire is often all you need to do)
Use the temporary setting to increase the number. Lower number means a shorter buffer so, you get less audio latency in exchange for the risk of the buffer emptying. I don’t have much problem with 256, but sometimes Proton adds some extra CPU overhead and I’ll bump it up to 512.
I’m saving your comment for when I’ll reinstall the operating system in a few days. Thanks.
Any advice on the other issue that mutes all notification sounds? Last time I checked there were plenty of posts on how to disable power savings on pulse but not for pipewire.
It always takes about one second to start any sound after staying silent for a little while. I managed to figure out it was a power savings mode putting the service to sleep and not waking up fast enough, for pulse it seems to be as easy as to change a true for a false to a power savings option inside a config file, I guess that in pipewire is the same but I couldn’t find the option, that line probably needs to be added somewhere and I’m not sure where and what to write exactly.
The part about the muted notifications was because all the sounds shorter than one second end before the thing wakes up.
There’s always sound.
It takes one second to start and there is some crackling with plenty of forum posts explaining how to fix these things going back to 2005 that are no longer relevant because the sound uses something with a different name now.
BUT THERE’S ALWAYS SOUND!
If a sound plays but there’s no audio server to receive it and convert it to an analog signal, does it make a sound?
This is almost always because your pipewire buffers are too small (because of the defaults erring on the side of low latency) and so when the CPU is busy the buffers empty and you get some crackling. Use pw-top to see all of your devices and sources, next to the devices you should see a number in the QUANT column. Chances are that this is really low (or 1)
You can change your minimum buffer (pipewire calculates this by setting a ‘quantum’), temporarily with :
You can edit /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf and add a line under the [clocks] section:
Restart pipewire for the setting to take effect:
(If your sound ever just dies for no reason, restarting pipewire is often all you need to do)
Use the temporary setting to increase the number. Lower number means a shorter buffer so, you get less audio latency in exchange for the risk of the buffer emptying. I don’t have much problem with 256, but sometimes Proton adds some extra CPU overhead and I’ll bump it up to 512.
I’m saving your comment for when I’ll reinstall the operating system in a few days. Thanks.
Any advice on the other issue that mutes all notification sounds? Last time I checked there were plenty of posts on how to disable power savings on pulse but not for pipewire.
That would depend on the notification application that you’re using.
Give me any details that you can think of. Software version, things you’ve tried, etc. I’ll look into it after work
Do sounds work sometimes and then stop or is it that they’re playing but the output is set to muted by default?
Thank you!
It always takes about one second to start any sound after staying silent for a little while. I managed to figure out it was a power savings mode putting the service to sleep and not waking up fast enough, for pulse it seems to be as easy as to change a true for a false to a power savings option inside a config file, I guess that in pipewire is the same but I couldn’t find the option, that line probably needs to be added somewhere and I’m not sure where and what to write exactly.
The part about the muted notifications was because all the sounds shorter than one second end before the thing wakes up.
Looks like this is a common enough issue:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Noticeable_audio_delay_or_audible_pop/crack_when_starting_playback
When in doubt, look into the Arch and Gentoo wikis they have good information that’s usually applicable to you even if you’re not using them (mostly).
Sometimes there’s no sound because someone (looks at cat) ate the cables…