CODEWITHSUNDEEP
audioraspberry-piraspbian
Kilokahn
Kilokahn

Reputation: 147

DAC pops on Song Start/Stop in Raspbian

This has been a plaguing issue for the Raspberry Pi install of Raspbian (Debian Wheezy) since it was first built. Talking directly to the Raspberry Pi foundation and the Raspbian team has given me no luck.

The issue itself is that the DAC doesn't initialize until it starts playing a song. It then will turn itself off when done, causing another pop. When using this for a pure music player it is infuriating to say the least, especially when the pop is loud.

I have heard this on VLC, MOCP and MPD. This has been covered in the Pi forums, but no answers are found: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=8783

I turn to you at Stack Overflow to see if there is a way to solve this issue. My idea is to initialize it at start-up so the pop only happens when it boots up, though I don't know how to control the ALSA to do that.

Hopefully a solution can be found.

Thanks!

Upvotes: 11

Views: 3911

Answers (3)

Björn Wetterbom
Björn Wetterbom

Reputation: 1

By using the Aureon Dual USB sound card I got zero popping from my raspi. Before I had popping at every song.

I have read that using the Aureon is impossible without limiting the usb ports to version 1.1, but this was not the case for me. It worked out of the box. One slight problem remains, I cannot insert the sound card when the raspi is on, it will reboot. But that's not a problem for me, I never remove the sound card.

My raspi runs raspbian wheezy and plays music via mpd and an nfs share.

Upvotes: 0

dbader
dbader

Reputation: 10491

I've experienced the same crackling and popping noises on the Raspberry Pi's analog output when using mpd. The problem is also discussed here: https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/128

Your idea of configuring the audio hardware to be initialized only once at boot time is exactly what I did to solve the problem. It's possible to do this using the PulseAudio sound system, which works as a proxy between the audio hardware and programs that want to output sound. For example, audio players like mpd can be configured to use PulseAudio as audio backend.

PulseAudio has a configuration option (module-suspend-on-idle) that configures audio hardware sleep. Disabling audio hardware sleep fixed all crackling and popping noises for me.

I've outlined the necessary steps in closer detail on my blog: http://dbader.org/blog/crackle-free-audio-on-the-raspberry-pi-with-mpd-and-pulseaudio

Upvotes: 3

Mejmo
Mejmo

Reputation: 2593

I have the same problem and resolution is to use either USB audio or HDMI audio output (however converting hdmi audio to analog audio is not easy, converter >40$). It is caused by broadcom firmware. They were saying on rpi forum that it is on the list, but no one knows when it will be really fixed ...

Update: I have tried Creative Play! USB audio, it is the same, however the "click" is not that loud. So it is not 100% solution, we have to wait for the fix.

Upvotes: 1

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