[Audio crackling] Possible priority wrongdoing for Pipewire and/or EasyEffects

[gabriele2000]

I believe system76-scheduler is clashing with Pipewire, EasyEffects and/or OBS priority.

Since it's 2:30AM here, I'll quickly link two bug reports that has every info that you guys could request, if not, I'll be happy to provide them when I wake up again.
EasyEffects: wwmm/easyeffects#2322
Pipewire: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/3198

[rexendevar]

I can confirm heavy crackling with the new scheduler, as pre-upgrade I had no issues with Pipewire at 128 buffer size, and now I'm getting unusable underrunning. I thought it was an issue within my audio interface as the xrun counter didn't increase proprtionally within either Reaper or Catia.

[gabriele2000]

I can confirm heavy crackling with the new scheduler, as pre-upgrade I had no issues with Pipewire at 128 buffer size, and now I'm getting unusable underrunning. I thought it was an issue within my audio interface as the xrun counter didn't increase proprtionally within either Reaper or Catia.

I've seen that purging the package doesn't even solve the problem... I reset everything from alsa to pipewire, even EasyEffects, tested with and without the scheduler but at this point I blame Pipewire

[rexendevar]

I can confirm heavy crackling with the new scheduler, as pre-upgrade I had no issues with Pipewire at 128 buffer size, and now I'm getting unusable underrunning. I thought it was an issue within my audio interface as the xrun counter didn't increase proprtionally within either Reaper or Catia.

I've seen that purging the package doesn't even solve the problem... I reset everything from alsa to pipewire, even EasyEffects, tested with and without the scheduler but at this point I blame Pipewire

I kind of think the onus is on the scheduler here as I don't recall ever having similar problems with the old version. That said I don't know which project would have to accommodate the other for everything to function properly. Maybe the default audio config for the old version was just perfect.

[gabriele2000]

I kind of think the onus is on the scheduler here as I don't recall ever having similar problems with the old version. That said I don't know which project would have to accommodate the other for everything to function properly. Maybe the default audio config for the old version was just perfect.

The fact is that if I disable EasyEffects everything's fine, unless I open OBS, then the audio shits itself.
So we can partially blame EasyEffects for the load, but ultimately the problem is Pipewire, since before 0.3.70 (maybe 0.3.68?) everything was fine and I didn't have cracklings.

Even is EasyEffect is the problem, realistically audio processing is an easy task since years, it's something that even a pentium 4 can do.

[rexendevar]

EasyEffects is not the problem. I get awful crackling with just Reaper on Pipewire and to a lesser extent with any other application, without EFX even installed. That said the problem only occurs at low buffer sizes. Possibility of these being separate issues but I doubt it.

[cmm]

does the problem go away if you sudo systemctl disable system76-scheduler and reboot? easy to do, no "purging" of whatever involved.
(FTR I don't know why you'd need something like s76-scheduler if you assume the Pipewire/RTKit combo is working as advertized...)

[gabriele2000]

does the problem go away if you sudo systemctl disable system76-scheduler and reboot? easy to do, no "purging" of whatever involved. (FTR I don't know why you'd need something like s76-scheduler if you assume the Pipewire/RTKit combo is working as advertized...)

I purged RTKit after it was constantly failing at setting the niceness level, plus since I'm using Pop!_Os, I want to have a good integration between Pop!_Os packages.

The problem doesn't go away if I disable or purge system76-scheduler, as I said before.

[rexendevar]

I have never had RTKit installed as far as I know.