I am getting some crackling noise during playback in Renoise. This is only happening when using my USB audio interface through Jack and not my internal IntelHDA chip. I am not getting XRuns during these crackles. I don’t get the crackles in other audio apps(ardour, hydrogen, guitarix). I changed the USB cable and my headphones to make sure they weren’t culprit. I am out of ideas here. What could be causing this crackling noise?
Running:
renoise 2.6.1
Fedora 14
Jack 1.9.6
have you read this?
have you read this and tried changing window manager to Openbox?
if both answers are ‘no’, have you done a forum search?
Working on USB devices, always provide for USB Audio interface separate USB port - no hubs etc.
Turn off also all power management stuff and so on…
Those posts don’t seem to be my issue. I haven’t tried switching to Openbox. But, I booted my AVLinux install and the same audio interface setup works with Renoise perfectly. So that leads me to believe it either lies in something Gnome is loading or a usb driver issue. AVLInux is using 2.6.36, while Fedora is using 2.6.35.
I killed gnome-power-manager, still crackles.
It is on its own direct usb port, and I made sure it isn’t sharing the IRQ with anything resource hungry like my graphics card.
the quest contines…
I switched to LXDE and still crackles.
I do get this warning when I plug my device in, could it be related?
[92.973230] ALSA sound/usb/clock.c:219: 3:1:1: endpoint lacks sample rate attribute bit, cannot set.
So I was messing around with this again today and noticed something. The crackling only happens during playback AND I’m on the Pattern Editor. When I switch to the Mixer, Sampler Keyzones, or Sampler Editor panes the crackling goes away. What is happening on that pane that could be causing my Jack audio playback through, only on my USB device to crackle???
What if you lowered the frame rate in the GUI preferences, does the crackling then become less? and what if you check the “show more compatible gfx updates” in the same GUI preferences?
What is your audio interface. It could be that it proper ALSA support was only written into that, more recent kernel in AVlinux. Check the ALSA wiki and see if there’s any info on your device. There may well be a quick patch, or instructions to edit a file or two that’ll fix the problem. 
Reducing and disabling the frame rate changes nothing. The “show more compat…” is only on Windows. I tried disabling the GUI effects, and it changed nothing.
This audio device has worked in the past, and Jack is using its Alsa driver.
So, I never figured out what was causing the problem. I distro hopped for a while and finally on the new Ubuntu Studio Natty, the issue is not there. YAYAYA…I just hope it never comes back.
wait, no, that was a mistake…FUQ.
I am getting lots of these in the logs:
JackActivationCount::Signal value = 0 ref = 3
JackActivationCount::Signal value = 0 ref = 3
JackActivationCount::Signal value = 0 ref = 3
JackActivationCount::Signal value = 0 ref = 3
JackActivationCount::Signal value = 0 ref = 3
JackActivationCount::Signal value = 0 ref = 3
JackActivationCount::Signal value = 0 ref = 3
JackActivationCount::Signal value = 0 ref = 3
JackActivationCount::Signal value = 0 ref = 3
JackActivationCount::Signal value = 0 ref = 3
JackActivationCount::Signal value = 0 ref = 3
JackActivationCount::Signal value = 0 ref = 3
JackActivationCount::Signal value = 0 ref = 3
JackActivationCount::Signal value = 0 ref = 3