Skipping Audio Issue

Help
1

I need some help with a very frustrating issue, at random times my audio skips and gltiches. It seems to be any audio, be it from Firefox, mpd or mpv.

I have spent a few days scanning the interwebs for configs, searching for documentation etc, but I haven’t really found the issue.

Initially I thought it was my USB DAC, so I plugged directly into my PC headphone jack and the issue has diminished somewhat, but I am still experiencing the issue.

This is the relevent snippet from my configuration.nix:

  # Enable Sound.
    sound.enable = true;
    security.rtkit.enable = true;
    hardware.pulseaudio.enable = false;
    services.pipewire = {
    enable = true;
    alsa.enable = true;
    alsa.support32Bit = true;
    pulse.enable = true;
    jack.enable = true;
  };
  environment.etc = {
  "pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/92-low-latency.conf".text = ''
    context.properties = {
      default.clock.rate = 48000
      default.clock.quantum = 1024
      default.clock.min-quantum = 32
      default.clock.max-quantum = 8192
    }
  '';
};

I added the default.clock section to see if that would help, it hasn’t really.

What other information can I provide? Any direction will be greatly appreciated.

2

This writeup is a bit (ahem) ranty and not just about audio, but maybe it can help: The year of Linux on the desktop | soapbox

1 Like
3

Thanks for the link. I have followed the steps there, so let’s see how we go.

4

Okay, no change, unfortunately.

5

I run pw-top and I see that mpd is showing 87 in the ERR column.

Not sure if this is relevent?

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6

what’s your mpd audio backend? I think the “pulseaudio” one tends to work better than “pipewire”, in case you use the latter.

7

Ah good call, I hadn’t thought of that. Yes it’s pipewire. I’ll switch to pulseaudio and see how we go.

8

Switched mpd to pulse, still getting the skipping. Four in the last 20 minutes which is far better than before.

9

next suggestion would be to keep increasing the “headroom” parameter in pipewire until you hit either success or diminishing returns…

1 Like
10

Thank you, I’ll be in touch once I figure out how to do that. I really appreciate the replies so far.