Ubuntu – PlayOnLinux audio issues

alsaplayonlinuxpulseaudiosoundwine

I am running Ubuntu 16.04, and I have a problem with PlayOnLinux. Whenever I try to start a game through POL, it seems to kill the system's sound. Even after POL is closed, none of the sound outputs work. Changing from HDMI audio to analog doesn't change anything. One thing to note is that the WINE install uses the ALSA driver while the system uses PulseAudio. What could be causing this issue? Thanks!

Update: Tested the issue further by launching Skyrim and using Spotify to test when the sound goes out. Turns out the problem starts when Steam starts through POL. Also tried running the debugger on Skyrim and got this curious ALSA error:

ALSA lib pcm.c:7963:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occurred
ALSA lib pcm.c:2266:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM default

Logfile: http://pastebin.com/PQfVfXJ4

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Ubuntu – Setting the default ALSA device for Pulseaudio

Answering the two questions:

You can select the default device in PulseAudio with a GUI like the GNOME volume control, pavucontrol, or from the command line using pacmd set-default-sink.

By default, PulseAudio opens devices for 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz, whichever leads to lower resampling effort (so 96 kHz audio would usually lead to the device being opened at 48 kHz. Also, we open the devices for S16LE by default.

Now, you have two options. If you just want to play a few files at their native format, paplay --passthrough <file> should do the job for you. You can even specify which device to use.

The other option is to globally make PA use 96/24. You can change that in /etc/pulse/default.conf (alternate-sample-rate = 96000, default-sample-format=s24-32le). This will lead to greater CPU usage, though. This is a bit of a silly situation, having to apply global configuration for all devices. We're planning to add per-device configuration at some point.

Note, after this, you should just use mplayer's PulseAudio backend rather than have mplayer talk to ALSA and then ALSA to PulseAudio. You can do that with mplayer -ao pulse ... and if you want to set it up permanently, add ao=pulse to ~/.mplayer/config.

Ubuntu – Wine sound is played way too fast and crackles horribly

Since this is the first result returned by Google, I'd thought I share my experience here. For those who look for a quick fix, put the following in your ~/.bashrc or /etc/profile for system-wide change:

alias wine='PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 wine'

This is the same fix that's used for Skype and PulseAudio 4.0 and above, which is behaving the same way as wine. Hope this helps!

Edit (12.01.2016):

You can enable this variable globally by adding this line to ~/.bashrc and logging out/rebooting

export PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60

If you're experiencing audio issues in other applications after this, simply delete the line and logout or reboot. If you want to test it temporarily, open a new terminal and paste that line. Now every application that you invoke from this terminal will have the variable set and PulseAudio will set the latency.

More information on this problem and the 'fix': http://arunraghavan.net/2013/08/pulseaudio-4-0-and-skype/

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Ubuntu – Setting the default ALSA device for Pulseaudio

Ubuntu – Wine sound is played way too fast and crackles horribly

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