8 ms·

I Tried Linux as My Main Dev Environment but Was Forced Back to Windows

31 points by nickjj 8y ago

seiferteric 8y ago
Don't know if it's related but I had pops and cracks in my audio when setting up 5.1 surround sound in Linux over S/PDIF. I messed with all the stuff mentioned including setting tsched=0 to no avail. The solution was to also set my channels to 6 in alsamixer, even though it was already set to 6 in pulse config. Another tip I read was to try disabling auto-mute in there, but that didn't work for me.
kevinherron 8y ago
I tried Windows once as my main dev environment but was forced back to MacOS / Linux.
- asark 8y ago
  It's weird that the version of Windows that finally added tools that might make it possible, if not pleasant, for me to do real work on it without truly doing all my work in a VM, also went so far into crazy-town that I don't even use it for gaming anymore.
  - kevinherron 8y ago
    Yeah, I gave a Surface Pro 4 with Windows 10 a go for like 9? months. Some things I remember that drove me crazy: - high DPI support was terrible - typed "git status" into a Linux subsystem terminal and it took so long to finish I gave up - there were ads in my Start menu (WTF)
  - PascLeRasc 8y ago
    Thankfully you don't have to anymore. Steam Proton is so incredibly well-polished and supports a ton of Windows-native games, sometimes even with higher performance.
  - 11sdmb8m 8y ago
    After a few minutes in the Group Policy Editor, most problems are solved permanently. Also, use the LTSC version, not the regular one.
    - kiddico 8y ago
      Where can a regular end user get an LTSC version? Last time I looked around the conversation quickly dissolved into piracy. Not sure if I was just looking in the wrong places though.
      - 11sdmb8m 8y ago
        You can't, it's for Enterprise users. You can find a clean ISO and change the KMS server to a server that will always activate your copy of Windows. That way you can be sure there's no malware involved.
        kiddico 8y ago
        Oh dear. I'm late to my own party. I'll look into settings all that up. I wasn't aware you could even take over that part of windows. Do you mean modify the iso before installing? Most of the not-a-kid-poking-things part of my life has been linux oriented, so I'm not really sure what things are open to modification in windows.
    - washadjeffmad 8y ago
      Where do we get a spin of Windows that disables telemetry and makes us the only admin and not also Micrsoft without needing to edit local GPO? Is it only the Chinese version?
- jenscow 8y ago
  I tried Windows for 2 decades as my main dev environment, but was forced onto Linux.
falcolas 8y ago
As someone who also uses a Scarlet 2i2 for recording audio in Linux (using Audacity), I can't say that I've run into this problem. The Scarlet "just works" for my usecase. Of course, that's probably not a point in favor of Linux. But, by the same token, I didn't precisely have a clear run of it in Windows either. Biggest was the inconsistent ducking and mic level behavior as everything tried to be the master of the audio system. The fact that some pre-processing engines on Windows needed to include "restart engine regularly" was also quite annoying.
- nickjj 8y ago
  Are you recording your voice? Did you plug it into a USB 2.0 or 3.0 port? Are you using Jack or anything else? Also in general, how finnicky is the red USB cable that connects your Scarlett to your machine? Does it cause a ton of distortion / pops if you move it the slightest? I wasn't moving mine during recording of course but it just feels like the whole thing is going to come disconnected, like it's hanging by a thread in terms of audio signal.
  - falcolas 8y ago
    Voice only, yes (Highly amateur podcasting & tutorials) 3.0 USB port. No additional software other than audacity. No problems with the USB cable so far. It's a fairly standard cable though, so getting a new one with better shielding shouldn't be too hard if that's a concern.
    - nickjj 8y ago
      If you touch that cable, you don't hear any distortion coming through the channel? If you have headphones on you'd hear it.
      - falcolas 8y ago
        I don't. Powered monitors, headphones, neither has a problem (even with the 48v mic power supply enabled).
slyrus 8y ago
I wonder if the author has tried using a low-latency or RT kernel. Setting up jack/pulseaudio/alsa isn't for the faint of heart but it's great when it all works right.
- slyrus 8y ago
  I've had decent luck with a Steinberg UR44 (USB 2, IIRC) on linux.
- nickjj 8y ago
  I didn't. I'm using the stock Debian kernel. But in the kernel's defense, on a much worse computer in terms of specs, a different USB mic had no pops with an older kernel (whatever ships with xubuntu 16.04). I also wasn't getting any xruns (according to Jack) at 512/2 which gave something like 45ms of latency which isn't too low (but is totally fine for talking into a mic, as opposed to drums, etc.).
fundamental 8y ago
Maintainer of a project in the linux audio space here. The simplified view is that for pro-audio pulseaudio is the enemy. It is not built for low latency, it is a complex beast to tune, it can be opaque to debug, and some defaults are not ideal (e.g. resampling behavior). If you are having problems with xrun like events then I would start by trying to reduce how much involvement pulseaudio can have on the pipeline. In many cases linux audio can just work, but when it doesn't the debugging process can end up getting somewhat involved. There are a few places where you might have some luck with more detailed debugging like the linuxmusicians forum, the linux-audio-user mailing list, or one of several IRC channels on freenode (e.g. #jack ).
- nickjj 8y ago
  That's the interesting thing though. According to Jack I have no xruns with 512/2, but the pops remain (but only on Linux because using the same hardware, same USB ports, etc. on Windows has no pops). I'm just recording my voice in 1 line of the Scarlett, so 50-100ms of latency is no problem. You ever hear of a case where pops were coming in quite often but it wasn't related to xruns reported by Jack? Thanks for the heads up on #jack, I didn't even know they had an IRC channel, but in theory I should be able to pull this off without Jack too since I'm not doing anything fancy (such as redirecting sound through a DAW)? Still, pops happened without Jack too.
  - fundamental 8y ago
    Having pops without jack indicates that either some other software layer is choking (e.g. pulse if the audio is still routed through it) or a hardware issue. You indicate that the hardware is without issue elsewhere, so that leaves the linux ALSA driver/driver settings, pulse (if it's interfering), jack, or the recording app. I do recall some mentions of a few of the Scarlett devices having quirks in the past, though I haven't personally been all that involved in those discussions. If jack or the recording application (connected to jack) were causing the issue then you should see an xrun reported from jack which makes me think that there's the possibility that it's being unexpectedly routed around via pulse (which can cause all sorts of shenanigans) or it's a know ALSA level driver quirk with respect to the device. The latter is unlikely as you're indicating that this is a USB device (IIRC the firewire ones were the more fussy ones). Even if you're not striving for low latency I would recommend some of the audio communities as they're likely to have stressed the same device a fair bit and may have encountered similar issues.
true_tuna 8y ago
I switched from Mac to Linux. On my Lenovo X1 everything works out of the box (audio is fine, Bluetooth and WiFi are fine, external displays etc). It’s not all sunshine and roses but no deal-breakers in two years. I’m super impressed by how far Linux has come.
Zyst 8y ago
I wavered in and out of using Linux for years, OS X, and roughly speaking have given up, and focus on Windows nowadays. The main reason I stopped using Linux is that a lot of "small" stuff won't just work, so then I go down a google quest, and fix it in anywhere between 5 minutes, and never. OS X mostly just works, Windows mostly just works. There are a lot of compromises to privacy, or games, or worse development environments, or worse performance for some hardware, or worse UX, or having to track down byzantine errors. I mostly reached the conclusion that no matter which OS you choose you are going to sacrifice something. Right now, I like games, I want to be able to play effortlessly. The friction between having to restart from OS X/Linux to windows is too much for me, I like to open Dark Souls, play 15 minutes, die, rage quit, get some work done, open Dark Souls again. That's a hard flow to get working in those operating systems. The future of Linux GPU VM dedicated pass through looks amazing, and my next computer I intend to at least give a shot of getting that to work, but I suspect that much like the author there will just be either a lot of tiny issues, or one big issue that will end up making me go back to Windows full time. There is no lesson to be had here, I'm just sad.
- nickjj 8y ago
  > That's a hard flow to get working in those operating systems. That is my exact use case for not dual booting either. Sometimes you want to do something without losing your entire context / environment from a reboot. With recording it's even more tricky because a dual boot won't work since you need to record the Linux environment and dual booting to break up the recording and editing aspect is no way going to happen. That's where the GPU pass through VM will come into play. I will try the GPU pass through approach in a few months once this course is done, assuming I can resolve the audio pops on Linux first since I would still be recording in Linux no matter what approach I went with.
- happytoexplain 8y ago
  >There is no lesson to be had here, I'm just sad. This pretty perfectly sums up how I feel after two decades of obsessing over the concept of a "good" OS. There is and will never be any such thing as an OS with a good UX + ecosystem that hits all three major use cases: development, productivity, and fun. Maybe I'm being pessimistic or maybe my standard are too high, but coming to grips with this conclusion has brought me some measure of peace.
otterpro 8y ago
If audio recording is the only thing holding you back, then I'd recommend you get a second PC dedicated for audio recording, running Windows or Mac, and use your main PC for Linux. That way, you'll be happy user and maintain your sanity, instead of complaining of the OS of your choice. Majority of video streamers (ie Twitch streamers) uses 2 system setup, where one PC is used for games and the second PC is dedicated for video recording in order to reduce the load on the gaming PC. Similarly, for screencast, I'd recommend Elgato CamLink or other Linux compatible HDMI capture device, so you can do recording/capturing on the Windows machine, while working on your Linux workstation. As for me, I use all three major OS: Mac, Windows, and Linux (Debian). Each OS have their strength and their weakness, so I try to use the right tool for the job.
- nickjj 8y ago
  Thanks for the reply. I thought most gamers just streamed through OBS on their main machine, since they are always tinkering with various OBS scenes in real time, etc.. It is audio recording holding me back but it's in the context of recording programming tutorials where I would want to record my desktop inside of a Linux environment as a screencast video. Right now I just do things through WSL but it's not comparable to a native Linux set up, and VMs are even worse (I tried the VM approach for over 5 years and it sucks). Would you mind going over the work flow for using one of those CamLinks? It's the first time I've heard of that before but it seems like it might be an interesting solution -- or at least something to look into as a last resort option. I'm not opposed to building a 2nd machine but how can something like this come together to solve my problem? Let's say I have 2 computers (1 running Windows and 1 running Linux) and I have 2 monitors, and in non-recording mode I would want to leverage both monitors in Linux. Would I need a third monitor to make this work? What does the set up look like?
120bits 8y ago
For me Homebrew made me moved back to MacOS. I love having a linux like system. I love having iTerm2 and flexibility to create bash scripts. Just few features I use and enjoy everyday.
nullifidian 8y ago
Try installing Ubuntu. I'm using 2i2 with a AT2030 through pulseaudio, and not having any issues in Audacity right now. My Ubuntu version is 16.04 with 4.4.0-137 kernel. I remember having some crack/pop issues (you could literally see absent points in Audacity) with earlier versions of the distro/kernels, but I think they evaporated after upgrade/reinstall. So it's kinda unreliable/flaky, depends on some kernel config perameter maybe, or config file in the distro. I forced mine to work in 44100 sampling rate due to an unrelated hardware malfunction that causes loud pops during device initialization and sample rate switching(observable in windows also). In /etc/pulse/daemon.conf default-sample-rate = 44100 alternate-sample-rate = 44100 Don't know if it affects the recording pops/cracks. Probably not. Another issue I had that evaporated with updates is that pulseaudio/audacity recording used to work with ginormous latency, like a second or more, maybe caused by the crack/pop issue itself forcing pulseaudio to increase buffer size to absurd sizes or something. Another bit of sound configuration I found in my "how to reinstall ubuntu guide" I've written for myself: in /etc/pulse/default.pa add the following before 'load-module module-default-device-restore': load-module module-remap-source source_name=input1 master=alsa_input.usb-Focusrite_Scarlett_2i2_USB-00.analog-stereo master_channel_map=front-left channel_map=front-left format=s32le rate=96000 remix=no this line turns 2 scarlet's inputs interpreted as stereo by the os into a a mono source (probably requires customization of the device name)
- nickjj 8y ago
  Have you tried recording with ffmpeg (using pulse or even alsa), or even OBS studio? Those drop outs are exactly what I think is happening here, even though I never looked at the waveform in Audacity, that's exactly what it sounds like. If it happened mid-word, it was like that section of the word was removed from the face of the Earth. The problem is I'm using a very new kernel (4.19) hmm. I was using 44.1k too by the way (also tried 48k too) and set it exactly how you did in daemon.conf. Thanks, that is a handy line to have in case I can get all of this to work. Sure beats mixing it back to mono in post-production for every recording. Although isn't that resetting the rate back to 96000 when you want it to be 44100?
  - nullifidian 8y ago
squarefoot 8y ago
Cracks and pops without buffer xruns might indicate some interrupt related problem. A long time ago in another galaxy we had a problem causing a very small but very regular data loss over local network communications using protocols with no flow control. Of course we would expect some data loss since we were using the wrong protocols for the job (though on a LAN it's not that common), but its regularity made it worth investigating, and in the end I discovered that an interrupt fired by the video card driver (IIRC) every x time would clog the system for a tiny fraction of a fraction of second during which the CPU would essentially be loaded at 100%. To get to the culprit I had to match to the millisecond timestamps of system interrupts with those of data losses. (I totally miss those days...) Back to the point: had I played audio instead of transmitting data, I would likely have heard those milliseconds of overloaded CPU in the form of pops and cracks, so it may be worth checking if you have something loading the system in bursts during which it cannot process audio safely.
- nickjj 8y ago
  I was keeping htop open during recording and never noticed anything too crazy. CPU was always about 30%-35% max on each of the 4 cores. Would you still think it's an interrupt issue if there were no pops and cracks on Windows using the same exact hardware in the same USB port?
  - squarefoot 8y ago
    Mine was just an idea. If you're experiencing an extremely short burst that overloads the machine, it could be so short that it disappears when measuring average cpu load which is what most tools do, but it could affect a near realtime buffer write or read (from an audio or network card). If there is any way to plot very short high spikes it should become recognizable, especially if it obeys some regular pattern like a timed irq or the like. In our old case, the hardware were Alpha workstations and Tru64 the OS, we nailed the problem to a driver because installing both Linux and *BSD on the same hardware the problem disappeared, so it can be a software issue.

31 points by nickjj 8y ago

Don't know if it's related but I had pops and cracks in my audio when setting up 5.1 surround sound in Linux over S/PDIF. I messed with all the stuff mentioned including setting tsched=0 to no avail. The solution was to also set my channels to 6 in alsamixer, even though it was already set to 6 in pulse config. Another tip I read was to try disabling auto-mute in there, but that didn't work for me.

kevinherron 8y ago

I tried Windows once as my main dev environment but was forced back to MacOS / Linux.

asark 8y ago
It's weird that the version of Windows that finally added tools that might make it possible, if not pleasant, for me to do real work on it without truly doing all my work in a VM, also went so far into crazy-town that I don't even use it for gaming anymore.
- kevinherron 8y ago
  Yeah, I gave a Surface Pro 4 with Windows 10 a go for like 9? months. Some things I remember that drove me crazy: - high DPI support was terrible - typed "git status" into a Linux subsystem terminal and it took so long to finish I gave up - there were ads in my Start menu (WTF)
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  Thankfully you don't have to anymore. Steam Proton is so incredibly well-polished and supports a ton of Windows-native games, sometimes even with higher performance.
- 11sdmb8m 8y ago
  After a few minutes in the Group Policy Editor, most problems are solved permanently. Also, use the LTSC version, not the regular one.
  - kiddico 8y ago
    Where can a regular end user get an LTSC version? Last time I looked around the conversation quickly dissolved into piracy. Not sure if I was just looking in the wrong places though.
    - 11sdmb8m 8y ago
      You can't, it's for Enterprise users. You can find a clean ISO and change the KMS server to a server that will always activate your copy of Windows. That way you can be sure there's no malware involved.
      - kiddico 8y ago
        Oh dear. I'm late to my own party. I'll look into settings all that up. I wasn't aware you could even take over that part of windows. Do you mean modify the iso before installing? Most of the not-a-kid-poking-things part of my life has been linux oriented, so I'm not really sure what things are open to modification in windows.
  - washadjeffmad 8y ago
    Where do we get a spin of Windows that disables telemetry and makes us the only admin and not also Micrsoft without needing to edit local GPO? Is it only the Chinese version?
jenscow 8y ago
I tried Windows for 2 decades as my main dev environment, but was forced onto Linux.

falcolas 8y ago

As someone who also uses a Scarlet 2i2 for recording audio in Linux (using Audacity), I can't say that I've run into this problem. The Scarlet "just works" for my usecase. Of course, that's probably not a point in favor of Linux. But, by the same token, I didn't precisely have a clear run of it in Windows either. Biggest was the inconsistent ducking and mic level behavior as everything tried to be the master of the audio system. The fact that some pre-processing engines on Windows needed to include "restart engine regularly" was also quite annoying.

nickjj 8y ago
Are you recording your voice? Did you plug it into a USB 2.0 or 3.0 port? Are you using Jack or anything else? Also in general, how finnicky is the red USB cable that connects your Scarlett to your machine? Does it cause a ton of distortion / pops if you move it the slightest? I wasn't moving mine during recording of course but it just feels like the whole thing is going to come disconnected, like it's hanging by a thread in terms of audio signal.
- falcolas 8y ago
  Voice only, yes (Highly amateur podcasting & tutorials) 3.0 USB port. No additional software other than audacity. No problems with the USB cable so far. It's a fairly standard cable though, so getting a new one with better shielding shouldn't be too hard if that's a concern.
  - nickjj 8y ago
    If you touch that cable, you don't hear any distortion coming through the channel? If you have headphones on you'd hear it.
    - falcolas 8y ago
      I don't. Powered monitors, headphones, neither has a problem (even with the 48v mic power supply enabled).

slyrus 8y ago

I wonder if the author has tried using a low-latency or RT kernel. Setting up jack/pulseaudio/alsa isn't for the faint of heart but it's great when it all works right.

slyrus 8y ago
I've had decent luck with a Steinberg UR44 (USB 2, IIRC) on linux.
nickjj 8y ago
I didn't. I'm using the stock Debian kernel. But in the kernel's defense, on a much worse computer in terms of specs, a different USB mic had no pops with an older kernel (whatever ships with xubuntu 16.04). I also wasn't getting any xruns (according to Jack) at 512/2 which gave something like 45ms of latency which isn't too low (but is totally fine for talking into a mic, as opposed to drums, etc.).

fundamental 8y ago

Maintainer of a project in the linux audio space here. The simplified view is that for pro-audio pulseaudio is the enemy. It is not built for low latency, it is a complex beast to tune, it can be opaque to debug, and some defaults are not ideal (e.g. resampling behavior). If you are having problems with xrun like events then I would start by trying to reduce how much involvement pulseaudio can have on the pipeline. In many cases linux audio can just work, but when it doesn't the debugging process can end up getting somewhat involved. There are a few places where you might have some luck with more detailed debugging like the linuxmusicians forum, the linux-audio-user mailing list, or one of several IRC channels on freenode (e.g. #jack ).

nickjj 8y ago
That's the interesting thing though. According to Jack I have no xruns with 512/2, but the pops remain (but only on Linux because using the same hardware, same USB ports, etc. on Windows has no pops). I'm just recording my voice in 1 line of the Scarlett, so 50-100ms of latency is no problem. You ever hear of a case where pops were coming in quite often but it wasn't related to xruns reported by Jack? Thanks for the heads up on #jack, I didn't even know they had an IRC channel, but in theory I should be able to pull this off without Jack too since I'm not doing anything fancy (such as redirecting sound through a DAW)? Still, pops happened without Jack too.
- fundamental 8y ago
  Having pops without jack indicates that either some other software layer is choking (e.g. pulse if the audio is still routed through it) or a hardware issue. You indicate that the hardware is without issue elsewhere, so that leaves the linux ALSA driver/driver settings, pulse (if it's interfering), jack, or the recording app. I do recall some mentions of a few of the Scarlett devices having quirks in the past, though I haven't personally been all that involved in those discussions. If jack or the recording application (connected to jack) were causing the issue then you should see an xrun reported from jack which makes me think that there's the possibility that it's being unexpectedly routed around via pulse (which can cause all sorts of shenanigans) or it's a know ALSA level driver quirk with respect to the device. The latter is unlikely as you're indicating that this is a USB device (IIRC the firewire ones were the more fussy ones). Even if you're not striving for low latency I would recommend some of the audio communities as they're likely to have stressed the same device a fair bit and may have encountered similar issues.

true_tuna 8y ago

I switched from Mac to Linux. On my Lenovo X1 everything works out of the box (audio is fine, Bluetooth and WiFi are fine, external displays etc). It’s not all sunshine and roses but no deal-breakers in two years. I’m super impressed by how far Linux has come.

Zyst 8y ago

I wavered in and out of using Linux for years, OS X, and roughly speaking have given up, and focus on Windows nowadays. The main reason I stopped using Linux is that a lot of "small" stuff won't just work, so then I go down a google quest, and fix it in anywhere between 5 minutes, and never. OS X mostly just works, Windows mostly just works. There are a lot of compromises to privacy, or games, or worse development environments, or worse performance for some hardware, or worse UX, or having to track down byzantine errors. I mostly reached the conclusion that no matter which OS you choose you are going to sacrifice something. Right now, I like games, I want to be able to play effortlessly. The friction between having to restart from OS X/Linux to windows is too much for me, I like to open Dark Souls, play 15 minutes, die, rage quit, get some work done, open Dark Souls again. That's a hard flow to get working in those operating systems. The future of Linux GPU VM dedicated pass through looks amazing, and my next computer I intend to at least give a shot of getting that to work, but I suspect that much like the author there will just be either a lot of tiny issues, or one big issue that will end up making me go back to Windows full time. There is no lesson to be had here, I'm just sad.

nickjj 8y ago
> That's a hard flow to get working in those operating systems. That is my exact use case for not dual booting either. Sometimes you want to do something without losing your entire context / environment from a reboot. With recording it's even more tricky because a dual boot won't work since you need to record the Linux environment and dual booting to break up the recording and editing aspect is no way going to happen. That's where the GPU pass through VM will come into play. I will try the GPU pass through approach in a few months once this course is done, assuming I can resolve the audio pops on Linux first since I would still be recording in Linux no matter what approach I went with.
happytoexplain 8y ago
>There is no lesson to be had here, I'm just sad. This pretty perfectly sums up how I feel after two decades of obsessing over the concept of a "good" OS. There is and will never be any such thing as an OS with a good UX + ecosystem that hits all three major use cases: development, productivity, and fun. Maybe I'm being pessimistic or maybe my standard are too high, but coming to grips with this conclusion has brought me some measure of peace.

otterpro 8y ago

If audio recording is the only thing holding you back, then I'd recommend you get a second PC dedicated for audio recording, running Windows or Mac, and use your main PC for Linux. That way, you'll be happy user and maintain your sanity, instead of complaining of the OS of your choice. Majority of video streamers (ie Twitch streamers) uses 2 system setup, where one PC is used for games and the second PC is dedicated for video recording in order to reduce the load on the gaming PC. Similarly, for screencast, I'd recommend Elgato CamLink or other Linux compatible HDMI capture device, so you can do recording/capturing on the Windows machine, while working on your Linux workstation. As for me, I use all three major OS: Mac, Windows, and Linux (Debian). Each OS have their strength and their weakness, so I try to use the right tool for the job.

nickjj 8y ago
Thanks for the reply. I thought most gamers just streamed through OBS on their main machine, since they are always tinkering with various OBS scenes in real time, etc.. It is audio recording holding me back but it's in the context of recording programming tutorials where I would want to record my desktop inside of a Linux environment as a screencast video. Right now I just do things through WSL but it's not comparable to a native Linux set up, and VMs are even worse (I tried the VM approach for over 5 years and it sucks). Would you mind going over the work flow for using one of those CamLinks? It's the first time I've heard of that before but it seems like it might be an interesting solution -- or at least something to look into as a last resort option. I'm not opposed to building a 2nd machine but how can something like this come together to solve my problem? Let's say I have 2 computers (1 running Windows and 1 running Linux) and I have 2 monitors, and in non-recording mode I would want to leverage both monitors in Linux. Would I need a third monitor to make this work? What does the set up look like?

120bits 8y ago

For me Homebrew made me moved back to MacOS. I love having a linux like system. I love having iTerm2 and flexibility to create bash scripts. Just few features I use and enjoy everyday.

nullifidian 8y ago

Try installing Ubuntu. I'm using 2i2 with a AT2030 through pulseaudio, and not having any issues in Audacity right now. My Ubuntu version is 16.04 with 4.4.0-137 kernel. I remember having some crack/pop issues (you could literally see absent points in Audacity) with earlier versions of the distro/kernels, but I think they evaporated after upgrade/reinstall. So it's kinda unreliable/flaky, depends on some kernel config perameter maybe, or config file in the distro. I forced mine to work in 44100 sampling rate due to an unrelated hardware malfunction that causes loud pops during device initialization and sample rate switching(observable in windows also). In /etc/pulse/daemon.conf default-sample-rate = 44100 alternate-sample-rate = 44100 Don't know if it affects the recording pops/cracks. Probably not. Another issue I had that evaporated with updates is that pulseaudio/audacity recording used to work with ginormous latency, like a second or more, maybe caused by the crack/pop issue itself forcing pulseaudio to increase buffer size to absurd sizes or something. Another bit of sound configuration I found in my "how to reinstall ubuntu guide" I've written for myself: in /etc/pulse/default.pa add the following before 'load-module module-default-device-restore': load-module module-remap-source source_name=input1 master=alsa_input.usb-Focusrite_Scarlett_2i2_USB-00.analog-stereo master_channel_map=front-left channel_map=front-left format=s32le rate=96000 remix=no this line turns 2 scarlet's inputs interpreted as stereo by the os into a a mono source (probably requires customization of the device name)

nickjj 8y ago
Have you tried recording with ffmpeg (using pulse or even alsa), or even OBS studio? Those drop outs are exactly what I think is happening here, even though I never looked at the waveform in Audacity, that's exactly what it sounds like. If it happened mid-word, it was like that section of the word was removed from the face of the Earth. The problem is I'm using a very new kernel (4.19) hmm. I was using 44.1k too by the way (also tried 48k too) and set it exactly how you did in daemon.conf. Thanks, that is a handy line to have in case I can get all of this to work. Sure beats mixing it back to mono in post-production for every recording. Although isn't that resetting the rate back to 96000 when you want it to be 44100?
- nullifidian 8y ago

squarefoot 8y ago

Cracks and pops without buffer xruns might indicate some interrupt related problem. A long time ago in another galaxy we had a problem causing a very small but very regular data loss over local network communications using protocols with no flow control. Of course we would expect some data loss since we were using the wrong protocols for the job (though on a LAN it's not that common), but its regularity made it worth investigating, and in the end I discovered that an interrupt fired by the video card driver (IIRC) every x time would clog the system for a tiny fraction of a fraction of second during which the CPU would essentially be loaded at 100%. To get to the culprit I had to match to the millisecond timestamps of system interrupts with those of data losses. (I totally miss those days...) Back to the point: had I played audio instead of transmitting data, I would likely have heard those milliseconds of overloaded CPU in the form of pops and cracks, so it may be worth checking if you have something loading the system in bursts during which it cannot process audio safely.

nickjj 8y ago
I was keeping htop open during recording and never noticed anything too crazy. CPU was always about 30%-35% max on each of the 4 cores. Would you still think it's an interrupt issue if there were no pops and cracks on Windows using the same exact hardware in the same USB port?
- squarefoot 8y ago
  Mine was just an idea. If you're experiencing an extremely short burst that overloads the machine, it could be so short that it disappears when measuring average cpu load which is what most tools do, but it could affect a near realtime buffer write or read (from an audio or network card). If there is any way to plot very short high spikes it should become recognizable, especially if it obeys some regular pattern like a timed irq or the like. In our old case, the hardware were Alpha workstations and Tru64 the OS, we nailed the problem to a driver because installing both Linux and *BSD on the same hardware the problem disappeared, so it can be a software issue.