Forgive me, but I just subscribed to the ML and I can't find a way to reply in-thread from the archives...
Hi Clemens and all alsa-users list members,
On 2009-10-09 14:14:59 Clemens Ladisch wrote:
> Samuel Gilbert wrote:
> > - Sound is never crystal clear
> >
> > - A ramdom amount of time after having the sound starts to degrade.
>
> What kind of degrdation?
It's kind of hard to describe. It's not clicking or cracking... You can
still make out the original music, but there are other electronic noises on
top. As time goes on, there is more noise than music.
My tests have shown that the driver configures itself for 2 channels at
44.1KHz, 16 bits. This is the same sampling frequency as the music files I'm
playing. I'l try to produce a recording of what comes out of my speakers.
Any peticular song you would like to listen to? ;-)
>
> > - When I stop the playback, I get an error message in dmesg :
> > [ 2211.734042] ALSA sound/usb/usbaudio.c:923: timeout: still 3 active
> > urbs.. [ 2211.734061] ALSA sound/usb/usbaudio.c:871: cannot submit
> > datapipe for urb 0, error -22: internal error [ 2216.766358] usb 3-2:
> > amarokapp timed out on ep0out len=0/0
>
> This might indicate a software problem, most likely in the USB
> controller driver. Try connecting through a hub, or not.
I will try that. I have tried with evry single USB port on both computers
(more than 8 on each) and lsusb revealed that most of the time, the sound
card got routed to the same USB host controller (OHCI on both computers.
Never EHCI (Device is USB 1.1)).
I've had the same problem. The only way I could solve it after lots of tries was to plug the card to the USB hub built into my monitor. It's a less than ideal solution, but at least I have sound.
Or I had. Some change introduced between Debian kernel 2.6.30-5 and 2.6.30-8, which is still present in kernel 2.6.31-1, causes that attempting more than one operation on the device kills the audio, and that's how I came to alsa-users and found your thread. Some easy ways in which I can reproduce this problem:
1) Start playing sound with totem/gstreamer, or sox' ALSA driver.
2) Start alsamixer. Boom, the device goes silent.
1) Start playing sound.
2) Start winecfg once Wine has been set up to use the ALSA driver. Boom, the device goes silent.
1) Start a game on Steam. Steam itself opens the audio device first, then when the game opens in, and the audio goes silent.
All these use cases were working a couple days ago before I went up from kernel 2.6.30 to .31 on my Debian/unstable box. Upgrading all system libraries and rebooting didn't help.
Once the audio goes dead restoring it is as simple as closing all applications with devices open in /dev/snd/*. After that audio works again, until it breaks as shown above.
Some things that don't cause the audio to go awry:
1) Sox' play + totem/gstreamer playing audio at the same time.
Note that these two open the audio device separately, according to lsof, so there's no external multiplexing.
1) Starting alsamixer.
2) Then playing sound with sox or totem/gstreamer.
And now for the funny part: If I plug the DAC directly to the motherboard's USB ports, all these problems go away. Only that I go back to the problems mentioned in the OP. In my case the audio degradation when going through the mobo's ports usually starts with a hiss and finally after a while goes as far as making the audio sound as a broken radio. To clarify, no audio degradation happens through the hub in the monitor (which is in turn connected to the mobo, naturally).
Unfortunately I cannot find the intermediate Debian kernel packages to make a quick bisection with pre-compiled kernels. In case anyone is familiar with what's been up on kernel development, here's the Debian changelog covering those releases: http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/l/linux-2.6/linux-2.6_2.6.31-1/changelog#versionversion2.6.30-8
I'll see if I can do a code bisect this weekend, but I'd appreciate the help of anyone familiar with this code. I'm also not sure whether future inquiries should go to this list or to LKML, though I'm starting to lean towards the latter.
Cheers,
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