Certified Pulseaudio moment
This might be a dumb question, but why are so many people saying they have sound issues? Did I just get lucky with the pc’s I have run Linux on and never have sound problems?
In the beginning there was oss, and then there was alsa. In the alsa days it was easy to get any given thing to work, but sometimes it was hard to make two separate things work at the same time.
Pulseaudio fixed this, but it took a long time, distros didn’t start adopting it until 2008 or so, and back then it wasn’t all that solid.
The meme makes no sense now that we have pipewire, but it’d have been fair between 1998 and 2009, depending on your configuration and usage case.
to be fair it does still make sense with lower-level distros like arch. usually it is as simple as installing pipewire + wireplumber or whatever, but that sometimes doesn’t work out of the box and there are also other ways to do audio
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It got a lot better in the last 5-10 years
But having functional audio in all applications was quite an archivement before that
I think it’s just old tribal knowledge that people have turned into a meme at this point, just like people thinking all versions of Linux are so arcane and obtuse, you need to be a master programmer or hacker to be able to make it run without crashing. When I was first starting out with it, around 2009, I remember having somewhat regular issues with my sound and my wifi just randomly deciding I was unworthy of either sound or wireless internet access. That was across distros when I was initially checking things out, as well as across releases of the same distro once I (mostly) settled down.
These days, I can’t remember the last time I had such problems that weren’t either the result of a specific bug that was shortly fixed, or the fallout of something stupid I did myself while tinkering with something and not paying enough attention.
my front audio ports don’t work and i have no idea if it’s a hardware or software issue so i just don’t bother with them
edit: fixed it by changing front port audio mode from HD audio to ac97 in bios settings
Congrats on fixing your audio.
I had that exact problem and fixed it by changing the audio mode from hd audio to ac97 in the bios settings. Apparently linux doesnt like realteks hd audio
i’ll try that, although im not sure what options my uefi (asrock) has so i should probably search it up.
edit: thanks! it works, the option was under Advanced -> Onboard Devices or Onboard Configuration, something like that (though pavu control crashed a bit but maybe im just not familiar with having multiple audio devices)
My primary issues on Linux have been wifi and GPU drivers. Wifi is fine these days, but trying to get actual 3D rendering to work still is a major headache.
3D rendering is the one thing Nvidia does better on Linux, I still do not understand why AMD makes it so difficult to access productivity features of their cards.
Frfr
Lot of issues with sound cards in the past. Also screw creative.
Tbh? I just set up Bazzite on my PC and it was the first time i had (some) sound issues too. Mostly related to my pcie soundcard, but my Mainboard aux ports aren’t working either. I think it’s driver related, just to many different vendors.
So the general missing driver thing. We do not have enough users, so companies don’t make drivers and we have to hope the community makes open source ones.
It really is a spiral. Well we just hope that every tech interested person will switch to linux and deal with the not so easy parts to try and get enough people so big corpo gets interested.
I only really have sound card issues a few years ago with Civ I think. And from my memories of playing Civ 4 on windows, the Civ series has always had sound issues. Not had them for a few years no so ehhh
Sound has always worked for me UNLESS I’m using with some niche desktop.
I feel like the last time I installed Linux and had any issues with sound or internet or anything like that has to be at least 15 years ago
Well, the song is from 1996. And Linux definitely was having trouble with sound then.
Lucky you! :)
For me, switching to Bluetooth half the time makess the audio go crackly and stuttering, which sometimes can be fixed by switching codec, sometimes not, and then after that happens my HDMI audio is screwed up too, even after turning Bluetooth off.
With steam games too, audio is the #1 most likely thing to be not working, or working improperly.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/405071/static-and-crackling-in-my-hdmi-audio for me this helped when i had hdmi issues
Thanks, appreciate the suggestions
Good for you! I just solved a shared audio problem on a Pi 5 in the last week. If I was watching something in VLC then paused it and wanted to look at something on YouTube, I couldn’t get any audio without killing VLC then later having to try to remember where I was up to.
Lmfao my SteamDeck’s audio broke for some reason while I was messing with Lutris (because yaRrr 🏴☠️), so I had to copy-paste a random redditor’s terminal commands into konsole and I honestly am not knowledged enough to know if it was malicious, but it had a few upvotes and was up for more than a week without getting taken down, so I just assume it’s probably fine.
One of these days, I’m gonna copy paste malware into the terminal lol.
install tldr and run it on the command and it should give you a general idea what the command is doing.
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This may be the best meme I’ve seen in this community, made me legitimately laugh.
I only post peak content ya feel me 🚀🚀
Fake, the song is from 1996. Linux has supported sound cards since 1992, so nobody from that point onwards ever lacked audio. /s
I currently have more audio issues on my MacBook Pro than my Linux desktop. The Mac will sometimes just fail to recognize headphones plugged into the 3.5mm TRS port. NixOS desktop w/ pipewire has no audio problems whatsoever.
Pipewire is amazing.
God, don’t remind me when I fucked up my audio on Arch because I had both pipewire and pulseaudio installed and didn’t realize it for a good hour.
Choices when trying to get reaper or ardour to work:
- Massive latency, unusable
- All other audio stops working
- No audio at all
- Have audio but now midi devices don’t work
At least for Linux-Reaper:
Use Jack. Install the “Pulse Jack Module”, route Pulseaudio through Jack to simultaneously connect Reaper and everything else to the Jack System out. Always autostart Jack and use the Pulse Module “autoconnect” parameter as a startup script (QJackCtl helps here).
Should fix 1-3, 4 I’m not sure.
I eventually gave up and just chose ALSA, which “just works” with the downside of being exclusive. I’ll give jack another try once I distrohop again.
Maybe I’m missing something obvious but how often is midi used in modern days?
Very often. You’re plobably thinking of midi playback, but all of those usb (piano) keyboards, drum pads, etc. use the same protocol. Midi is very much not dead.
Extremely frequently. Digital musical instruments generally don’t output production quality sounds – they output MIDI data that describes what note is being played, and an audio synthesizer device or software interprets it and generates the audio data.
Right. I guess I consider that a relatively niche usecase. But on second thought I suppose it’s not that niche once you include hobbyist musicians and that kind of crowd.
I wanted to make the analogy of every tech YouTuber reviewing a laptop or non-high-end PC saying “you’re not going to be rendering long videos on this thing” as if that’s a relatable use case. No, YouTuber, that’s not something most people do on their computers! Most people probably never do it in their life, or only a handful of times ever.
But as I said upon more thought I realize that’s not the case with midi.
it’s absolutely not niche
Any electronic music uses midi basically. So a lot of it
All the time! Not bad for a 1983 protocol.
I feel like I got pretty lucky with my bitwig setup (on arch)? I selected PipeWire as the output driver and everything just works (no latency, midi is fine, other apps can still be heard). the only caveat is I have to fiddle a bit if I want the audio to be sent over screen sharing apps, which I think introduces a decent amount of latency. Maybe bitwig has invested in some tech the other DAWs don’t have since it’s commercial software and Linux support is one of their competitive advantages…
That applies to reaper as well. I think it’s mostly that linux sound servers are a pain.
It’s a cheap shot, but I’ll allow it.
I’m having a terrible anxiety flashback from installing Ubuntu on a netbook back in 2010. It was like a 20 command process that required babysitting and a second computer. It felt like each thing I fixed broke two other things.
Things are better now, thankfully.
Average PulseAudio user.
Virtually insane
I need to set my volume over 22% or so so that I get any sound at startup or when plugging my speakers in, then I can lower the volume again.
TBF I haven’t had a sound issue after Linux mint switched to pipewire.
I haven’t had a sound issue since I unplugged the speakers
Say, that’s some smart thinking.
I installed Mint on an old laptop and had sound issues with external speakers. Spent 30 mins trouble shooting until I realized there was something with the port that if you fully pushed in the aux cable, it went in too much and the contacts don’t fully meet. There was a sweet spot where the cord is plugged in correctly but not pushed in too much.
This is the sort of thing I’d spend 3 days troubleshooting
I did but that was mostly my own doing.
Linux, in an nutshell.
A lot of Linux issues are actually just messing around then finding out
Copium.
I want to like pipewire but configuration is a hell scape of configuration files that bare no resemblance to any I’ve dealt with before, and doesn’t recognise my audio interface probably so I have to just fully stop all pw services and use jack for Ardour.
You have to configure it???
Not usually, but the second you do it’s complete hell
Yeah, I didn’t know Mint uses it and spent an hour trying to understand how to configure alsa and why my configuration looks correct but doesn’t do what I want (swap front channels)
For me it’s like:
- PulseAudio - Bluetooth Audio doesn’t work
- PipeWire - Audio sometimes work, sometimes not. Reboot and figure it out.
Sadly, I have sound issues since the switch to pipewire is complete. There is less stuttering, yes, but sometimes I experience complete silence. Only if I change the volume a bit, it is back again.
I suspect random switches to the dummy output but I could not find the source of the problem, yet.
