Audio Crackling bug i've been running into

General Linux Question
1

Hello world! I’ve been running into a weird audio Crackling issue for some reason ever since I updated my system, I use Fedora 38 for its stability and due to how up to date it is, However I’ve been running into an audio bug that has been irritating me for the last week now, it goes a little something like this: I have 2 or more audio sources playing simultaneously (Ex. discord call and a youtube video for some bgm) or all of the sudden the audio starts crackling (Ex. when viewing a youtube video or just listening to music)

This has become irritating to me and i only found a temporary fix where i can fix the issue by running a basic python script that resets the pipewire server, however it is temporary and I do end up running into it again later on

I have made an issue about this on the Pipewire Gitlab Issue #3390 and people were suggesting that the Linux kernel 4.6 has been causing this problem due to a driver bug, I’ll list some info below and if anyone can help or provide insight then that would be much appreciated! ^^

Neofetch:

solidsnake@fedora
-----------------
OS: Fedora Linux 38 (Workstation Edition) x86_64
Host: Latitude 3420 Kernel: 6.4.7-200.fc38.x86_64
Uptime: 12 mins
Packages: 2160 (rpm), 57 (flatpak)
Shell: bash 5.2.15
Resolution: 1920x1080
DE: GNOME 44.3
WM: Mutter WM Theme: Adwaita
Theme: adw-gtk3-dark [GTK2/3]
Icons: Adwaita [GTK2/3]
Terminal: kgx
CPU: 11th Gen Intel i5-1135G7 (8) @ 4.200GHz
GPU: Intel TigerLake-LP GT2 [Iris Xe Graphics]
Memory: 4746MiB / 15722MiB

Inxi --audio:

Audio:
Device-1: Intel Tiger Lake-LP Smart Sound Audio
driver: sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl
API: ALSA v: k6.4.7-200.fc38.x86_64 status: kernel-api
Server-1: PipeWire v: 0.3.76 status: active

2

Hi @Ali,
I don’t know if I can help you with your problem, but at least I’ll try:
Can you open a tab in Firefox, type about:support in the search box and say what values you have in Media (it’s located about halfway down the page) for Preferred Sample Rate and Roundtrip latency (standard deviation)?
I’m not on the distro I’m using PipeWire on at the moment, but here’s a screenshot as an example of my data:

image

In my case, I had a very low latency and I had to increase the latency to get rid of the noise, but I don’t use kernel 4.6 neither Fedora.

Jorge

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3

Did you mean 6.4 ?

I get something not too dissimilar on my Pop!_OS desktop system,
Linux titan 6.4.6-76060406-generic

It happens when I move my head - using Bluetooth headset - happened today (crackling and stuttering) - I was also having Bluetooth issues with my mouse, my keyboard (which includes a trackpoint : Lenovo ThinkPad II keyboard over 2.4 dongle) works fine, so I did a “sudo systemctl stop bluetooth.service”, then “sudo systemctl start bluetooth.service” - don’t always trust “restart” with systemd… Anyway that fixed the issue… I occasionally use the same headset wired from 3.5 mm stereo jack, but it this issue only ever seems to happen on BlueTooth…

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