Audio is choppy

[apokkalyps]

I've googled around and only seen people talking about choppiness regarding video. I've always loved VLC and have gotten many friends using it as their primary player because of its self-contained versatility. Recently I upgraded to Ubuntu Hardy and about the same time (cant necessarily say upgrading caused it) my audio playback through VLC has become very choppy and poor. It happens whether I'm playing an mp3, or a .rm, or even the audio off of a .mov file, and possibly other formats I haven't tried.

I'd really like to find a fix for this if possible because as I said, I am very loyal to VLC and would hate to have to find something else.

[rlange]

I can confirm this glitch when I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 also. Using other audio players this does not happen. Being a long time user of vlc I noticed this quickly after the upgrade. Songs seem to skip. Thanks btw to the developers of VLC.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Are you using Pulse Audio output ?

[rlange]

I am using VLC media player 0.8.6e and am unable to find a setting for Pulse audio output in the preferences.

[paradoxni]

I am also having choppy audio when playing movies via VLC. Clicking/skipping of audio, very annoying. When movie is played using the default movie player in Ubuntu (totem?) it plays fine with no audio faults.

Clean, recent and fully updated install of 64bit Ubuntu 8.04 (hardy) with VLC player installed (using synaptic package manager) and audio output set to pulse audio. Ubuntu sound preferences also set to Pulse audio, however other options (AUTO, ALSA) seem to give the same problem.

[ab4rl1]

Same problem here (Ubuntu 8.04, AMD64) playing MP3's and FLV files. Doesn't matter if I'm using Pulse, or ALSA, or OSS, the choppiness is still there. Totem plays files fine. I didn't have this problem with earlier versions of Ubuntu using the same hardware.

[fyo]

I had the exact same problem as the rest. It doesn't happen on all audio (PCM and AAC, seem to suffer a lot).

Needing a fix NOW, I tried the latest nightly from this thread:

viewtopic.php?f=13&t=45907

The audio problem appears solved but the app as a whole isn't perfect. Of course, this is a nightly, so stability could easily be an issue.

The point is, the audio problems seem to have been solved at some point and finding a newer "stable" might be the best option. The version of VLC available through the official repositories is 0.8.6e, whereas the latest stable is 0.8.6h. There are a lot of changes, both stability and security, between the e and h versions, at least going by the changelog: http://www.videolan.org/developers/vlc/NEWS

Some notable bug fixes related to sound:

* Fix some problems with AAC decoder & packetizer
* Fixed AAC resampling
* Miscellaneous bugfixes in multiple modules and in libvlc
(ftp access, record access filter, video filters, RC interface,
playlist demuxer, IP networking, MPJPEG muxer, stream outputs)
* More reliable audio reception for MPEG TS streams

[hazelnut]

There is a bug in Alsa/Pulseaudio which causes some sound cards to chop audio. Basically if your sound card doesn't do hardware mixing, you will suffer. Easy solution for vlc: killall pulseaudio -- vlc should then play audio flawlessly as before. Worked for me.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

There is a bug in Alsa/Pulseaudio which causes some sound cards to chop audio. Basically if your sound card doesn't do hardware mixing, you will suffer. Easy solution for vlc: killall pulseaudio -- vlc should then play audio flawlessly as before. Worked for me.

Is this the bug about too much buffering ? Are you able to compile a VLC ?

[hazelnut]

There is a bug in Alsa/Pulseaudio which causes some sound cards to chop audio. Basically if your sound card doesn't do hardware mixing, you will suffer. Easy solution for vlc: killall pulseaudio -- vlc should then play audio flawlessly as before. Worked for me.

Is this the bug about too much buffering ? Are you able to compile a VLC ?

I don't compile vlc. I use the stock version released with Ubuntu 8.04.

There are issues with pulseaudio not playing nice with alsa aware apps. See here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578 for a fix. My quick fix to make vlc play without chopping the audio was to set all sounds to use alsa in ubuntu preferences and then kill pulseaudio. I have not gone through the details at the link I just gave.