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Stuttering audio on Linux

jcoles
2019-05-17
2019-05-19
  • jcoles

    jcoles - 2019-05-17

    Audio stutters on Linux with every version I've tried post v2.2-svn1021,
    whether compiled or installed from a .deb package. The audio cuts in and
    out, 20ms of audio then 20ms of silence. Surely I'm not the only person
    experiencing this. Is there any way that I can gather the information
    needed to solve this problem? Can I open ticket on it?

    I'm running Linux Mint 19.1 64-bit.

     
  • Julian Cable

    Julian Cable - 2019-05-19

    Hi Jon, sorry for the slow response at the moment. I'm on holiday in Ireland. I've added you to the developer list so you should be able create tickets.

    I'm very confused by the highly varying capture behaviour as things haven't changed much at this end ever. I think there have been recent behaviour changes to the underlying Linux drivers. Or perhaps sound cards have smaller buffers these days, or it could be related to the locking and tick changes to the Linux kernel itself since the original code was written.

    For linux there are multiple options for audio drivers.

    The original code by Volker and Alex had OSS and Alsa drivers. We ditched the OSS build a long time ago and until recently the Alsa code was broken but I fixed it recently and it is worth a try.

    Later we added Portaudio and Jack drivers but the Jack code is unmaintained as its easy to use Jack in combination with the PulseAudio interface David Flamand added a few years ago. This was the most mature Linux audio but it does seem to have its own problems.

    I've been working on QtMultimedia. This works great on my Mac and Mark Fine is working on it for his different Mac. It is getting better but as it relies on different underlying code on Linux and MacOs and Windows it isn't production ready yet. On Linux it seems to mostly use GStreamer and you would then need to configure the plugins in GStreamer.

    Windows uses the old Windows Multimedia interface which isn't strongly supported in Windows 10.

    Its a bit of a nightmare keeping up to date so any help you can provide will be much appreciated.

    Start by raising a ticket and specifying exactly the setup you have.

    Then maybe have a play building with Alsa.

    It is just a matter of having the right libraries installed and running qmake with some options:

    qmake CONFIG+=alsa CONFIG+=sound QT-=multimedia

    should do it.

     

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