Ubuntu – Static noise when playing sound

alsanoisesound

From time to time I get a lot of static noise when playing sound. It stops when no sound is played (e.g. when music playback is stopped).

  • Seems to be independent from output device (same symptons with either my speakers or headphones)
  • When stopping sound, the static noise lingers for just a tiny bit. It doesn’t stop immediately
  • Unplugging my speakers and then plugging them in again amplifies the symptoms.
  • Opening the alsamixer GUI in the terminal and making sure that the levels are not in the red area makes things a bit better, but doesn’t solve this issue

Lastly, for what I can tell, this happens at completely random times. And it goes away just like that. I tried rebooting several times, no luck. At some point in the future it will be just fine.

So I have absolutely no idea what the hell is going on and how to fix it.

Best Answer

For what it’s worth, running the following seems to fix the issue:

pulseaudio -k

As to why, I have no idea.

From pulseaudio man page:

-k | --kill: Kill an already running PulseAudio daemon of the calling user (Equivalent to sending a SIGTERM).

Edit: This works reliably for me. Whenever this issue comes up, I run this command to fix it.

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