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Albert
Asked: 2021-01-14 04:54:13 +0800 CST

Audio device got stuck

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Audio device got stuck!

This is the error message I get from Mplayer. But the problem is the same with all applications, when playing sound (which all use PulseAudio by default). I.e. I hear extreme stuttering, and it is mostly hanging. This also causes any videos to hang, e.g. YouTube video (thus my post here).

This seems to be PulseAudio related. Because when I play via ALSA, it works fine. (I.e. disable the device in the PulseAudio controller, then use mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=1.0 ....)

Also, the problem was not always there, but only occurred since some recent update.

Ubuntu 20.04.

Relevant audio devices (via lspci -nn):

09:00.1 Audio device [0403]: NVIDIA Corporation TU106 High Definition Audio Controller [10de:10f9] (rev a1)
0b:00.4 Audio device [0403]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Starship/Matisse HD Audio Controller [1022:1487]

The second device is the device I want to use.

head -n1 /proc/asound/card1/codec\#0:

Codec: Realtek ALCS1200A
sound

2 Answers

  1. I'm just experiencing similar audio problems, too.

    I guess it is a problem, related to a recent update since it never happened before (1 to 2 weeks on Xubuntu 20.04 LTS) and will be fixed in a coming update. Until then, following command helped me to solve the problem for some hours without restart:

    pulseaudio --kill
# the same as:
# pulseaudio -k

    It takes 2 to 3 seconds for pulseaudio, which will restart automatically, and often the programs, doing audio, will work again without further intervention; sometimes I have to restart the affected programs (browser, vlc).

    At least I don't have to logout or restart the computer, as YT-Videos often suggest.

    I hope this helps and a real update fix will be provided soon.

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  2. Maybe it is related to sleep.

    I tried this in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf:

    options snd-hda-intel position_fix=2

    Also sudo alsa force-unload together with killall pulseaudio (in a loop) until I finally unloaded all modules, and then reload via sudo modprobe snd-hda-intel.

    Now it temporarily seems to work again.

    After another restart, I had the problem again. Again, I did this loop:

    $ while true; killall pulseaudio; sudo alsa force-unload; end

    and after that succeeded after some iterations, I did:

    sudo modprobe snd-hda-intel

    That again fixed the problem.

    I'm not sure if that position_fix=2 is really relevant. But then I also don't really know what the real problem is.

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