Skipping (hicup) sound on YouTube videos and when playing Music.

[carmichaelits]

Sound is skipping, well more of a hicup really. It can be really bad on YouTube and can effect playing music on Rhythmbox or VLC.

(Edit: Using Ubuntu 14.04)

When the hicup happens its like it has forgotten that it played the last second of audio, so then plays it again. Example, if the song was "la la I'm singing a song" it would occasionally play "la la I'm singing singing a song", like a dirty CD.

Very strange. I have already done some reading up on it on the forums. People are saying that its got something to do with Pulse something or other. I followed the advice of a member and ran a sudo command that I believe was to remove said Pulse application/package. After removing this I went to change my desktop background and noticed my system settings manager had gone, I have no idea if these are connected in anyway. I installed the system settings back on from the Software Centre. But looks like the hicup in the audio is still here.

It can get really bad on some videos, doing it every 10-15 secs. Other videos its fine. Same goes for Music, I can go through 4-5 tracks before I notice it. Very strange.

I'm trying to pick Ubuntu back up again, I was using it years ago when the fancy Unity thing'mic'boob wasn't there. I come from a heavy windows IT tech background and Ubuntu is just so fresh. I have a secret love for Ubuntu I think. Although this sound thing is chipping away at my moral a little. I was going to buy a semi-beefy new laptop with no operating system and run it on Ubuntu, but I couldn't handle it if it had this skipping audio thing. Its very irritating.

Please help Ubuntu community, I will be forever grateful and be sure to annoy you more in the future, when the next problem arises.

System Info (Hardware things that I think may effect the sound if known problematic with Ubuntu):

• Motherboard: M3N78-PRO - http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/M3N78_PRO/
• Processor: AMD Phenom 9650
• GPU: 9800GTX+ (Using proprietary drivers 331.38 tested)
• Samsung EVO SSD 830 120GB
• No Sound Card, using the built in motherboard sound card.

[Yellow Pasque]

Worth a try: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Audio/PositionReporting

[carmichaelits]

Deleted

[carmichaelits]

Nice one, although; not finding this wiki page now makes me feel like a dirty lazy noob. Although the problem now seems to be fixed, thanks for your help Temujin.

Here is what I done for other dirty lazy noobs (disclaimer: this term is not men't in a derogatory manner) like me.

System and Hardware

Running System Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Download and installed HardInfo aka "System Profiler and Benchmark"- you can find it on the Software Centre searching this. This was just to check what Ubuntu was calling my sound card/driver/chip.

You can find what sound you have under Computer > Summery -] Multimedia > Audio Adapter

In my case it says HDA-Intel - HDA NVidia

Testing Method

I am using this video to test https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9naXmOYAdE This for me seemed to skip a lot during testing.

Testing was done with google chrome with pepper flash disabled. (although having pepper flash disabled probably had nothing to do with this fix)

To disable Pepper flash type chrome://plugins into your url bar (making sure to click the one with the folder icon and not the search icon) and click to disable Adobe Flash Player 14. Doing this will use the the same flash player that firefox uses.

Fix Method 1 - HDA Intel Config

There are two settings you can choose from trying this fix, ether setting the number at the end to a 1 or a 2. Here is what I done.

Variation 1

Opened terminal and enter:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

Enter your user account password.

This will open the HDA Intel sound card configuration file.

Add the following at the bottom (in a new line):

# Skipping audio fix
options snd-hda-intel position_fix=1

Click save and restart

Result on this test for me:FAILED

Variation 2

Same as above but change the end number to 2.

Click save and restart

Result on this test for me:FAILED

Fix Method 2 - PulseAudio

Open terminal and enter:

sudo gedit /etc/pulse/default.pa

Enter your user account password.

This will open a PulseAudio configuration file.

Find and change the following line from:

load-module module-udev-detect

to

load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

Click save and restart

Result on this test for me:PASSED

Thanks to Temujin for providing the wiki page that I was to lazy to look for.