[Pkg-alsa-devel] Bug#881715: alsa-utils:

[Andoru]

Package: alsa-utils
Version: 1:7.7+16
Severity: normal


As the title says, I'm having a bit of an issue with ALSA, and the high
CPU (~15-20%) usage in some cases. So far on the default device, I've
only noticed this with VLC and foobar2000 (through Wine), but there are
other apps/games that might have the same problem. It's just easy to
tell if an app/ALSA uses too much CPU if you just play some audio files
and you don't have anything else that might need the extra CPU power,
like rendering the video stream or render the graphics. I can fix the
high CPU usage in VLC if I switch the audio sub-device from the Default
to a specific one (in my case: Analog Front Speakers). There is no
change in the audio quality, but the resources used instantly decrease.
The only problem with this is that I can no longer play/hear any audio
from other apps/games (so basically VLC monopolises the card). Also,
this is not possible under Wine, so I can't achieve the same thing for
foobar2000, or other Windows apps/games.
I haven't made any custom
config files for ALSA, except to disable the HDMI audio output (so that
the normal analogue output is used by default in all apps/games), and
I've done that in /etc/modprobe.d/intel-disable-hdmi.conf with this as
it's content:

_______________________________________________________________________

options snd_hda_intel enable=0,1
_______________________________________________________________________


The soundcard that I'm using is an integrated one, and it's a Realtek ALC887-VD.
Does anyone know what I could do to fix this issue, while still being able to
play multiple streams of audio at the same time?


-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.13.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8),
LANGUAGE=en_GB:en (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages alsa-utils depends on:
ii  kmod              24-1
ii  libasound2        1.1.3-5
ii  libc6             2.24-17
ii  libfftw3-single3  3.3.6p2-2
ii  libncursesw5      6.0+20170902-1
ii  libsamplerate0    0.1.9-1
ii  libtinfo5         6.0+20170902-1
ii  lsb-base          9.20170808
ii  whiptail          0.52.20-1+b1

alsa-utils recommends no packages.

alsa-utils suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information
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