Ubuntu – How to disable the “popping” sound when adjusting the volume

PulseAudio is an audio system that, among other things, enables multiple applications to use the audio interface at the same time. It can also be used for things like sharing audio over the network. So, PulseAudio is a good thing.

1. If PulseAudio keeps crashing, then something is wrong. The best way for you to prevent that from happening, is to file a bug on http://Launchpad.net and get the developers attention. We don't exactly have a configuration option to enable or disable application crashes. :)

2. Yes, restarting the indicators might be a successful workaround. In order to do that, you'll press AltF2 and type killall unity-panel-service

If restarting PulseAudio and then restarting the panel service works, then you might want to combine them in a script so you can do both things at once. You can then create a new text file in Gedit, paste the following and make the file executable. You do that by right clicking on the file, selecting properties > permissions > Allow execution of file. Afterwards, you can run that script as a normal program.

This is the script itself:

#!/bin/sh
pulseaudio --start
killall unity-panel-service

So, if you call the file fix_audio.sh and place it in your home directory, you'll be able to run it by pressing alt+f2 and typing ~/fix_audio.sh.

However, even if this workaround works, you should still file a bug on Launchpad so that the problem itself gets fixed for you and everyone else.

I suspect it is the power save mode kicking into action which is causing the popping sounds. Save the following into a file called audio-power-save-off

#!/bin/bash
for dev in /sys/module/snd_*; do
        [ -w "$dev/parameters/power_save" ] || continue
        echo 0 > "$dev/parameters/power_save"
done

and do the following:

chmod +x audio-power-save-off
sudo ./audo-power-save-off

and see if it helps