Bug#581624: pulseaudio: Stuttering playback from Wine

[Mark Wooding]

Package: pulseaudio
Version: 0.9.21-1
Severity: normal

I listen to music using Spotify running under Wine.  Every now and then
-- I don't know exactly how to provoke it, but leaving the machine idle
for a few hours is usually good enough -- the audio output of Spotify is
unlistenably choppy, and not in a way that recovers as described in
#523389.

I get the same problem on two machines running a squeeze/sid mix (one
with a stock 686 kernel, one with a tuned low-latency kernel with
PREEMPT and HZ=1000, specifically configured to keep JACK happy) and on
my laptop which runs Ubuntu Lucid (with stock kernel).  No, I'm not
actually trying to run JACK at the same time as Spotify.

I'm blaming PulseAudio for this because I've not found anything I can do
to Spotify or Wine to make the choppiness go away, but if I set the
card's profile to `off' and then back to whatever it was before, the
sound immediately becomes fine.  I have the following (deeply
unpleasant) script saved as `~/bin/kick-pulseaudio'.  It gets a lot of
use.

#! /bin/sh

set -e

pacmd list-cards | sed -n '
        /^[[:space:]]*index: / {
                s///
                h
        }
        /^[[:space:]]*active profile: <\(.*\)>.*$/ {
                s//\1/
                H
                x
                s/\
/ /
                p
        }
' | while read index profile; do
        pacmd set-card-profile $index off >/dev/null
        pacmd set-card-profile $index $profile >/dev/null
done

I realise that this is probably very hard to track down.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.31.9 (PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages pulseaudio depends on:
ii  adduser                       3.112      add and remove users and groups
ii  consolekit                    0.4.1-4    framework for defining and trackin
ii  libasound2                    1.0.22-2   shared library for ALSA applicatio
ii  libasyncns0                   0.3-1      Asyncronous name service query lib
ii  libc6                         2.10.2-6   Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libcap2                       1:2.17-2   support for getting/setting POSIX.
ii  libdbus-1-3                   1.2.24-1   simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libgdbm3                      1.8.3-9    GNU dbm database routines (runtime
ii  libice6                       2:1.0.6-1  X11 Inter-Client Exchange library
ii  libltdl7                      2.2.6b-2   A system independent dlopen wrappe
ii  libpulse0                     0.9.21-1   PulseAudio client libraries
ii  libsamplerate0                0.1.7-3    Audio sample rate conversion libra
ii  libsm6                        2:1.1.1-1  X11 Session Management library
ii  libsndfile1                   1.0.21-2   Library for reading/writing audio 
ii  libspeexdsp1                  1.2~rc1-1  The Speex extended runtime library
ii  libudev0                      153-2      libudev shared library
ii  libwrap0                      7.6.q-18   Wietse Venema's TCP wrappers libra
ii  libx11-6                      2:1.3.3-3  X11 client-side library
ii  libxtst6                      2:1.1.0-2  X11 Testing -- Resource extension 
ii  lsb-base                      3.2-23.1   Linux Standard Base 3.2 init scrip
ii  udev                          153-2      /dev/ and hotplug management daemo

Versions of packages pulseaudio recommends:
ii  gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio      0.10.22-1  GStreamer plugin for PulseAudio
ii  libasound2-plugins            1.0.22-1   ALSA library additional plugins
ii  pulseaudio-esound-compat      0.9.21-1   PulseAudio ESD compatibility layer
ii  pulseaudio-module-x11         0.9.21-1   X11 module for PulseAudio sound se

Versions of packages pulseaudio suggests:
ii  paman                         0.9.4-1    PulseAudio Manager
ii  paprefs                       0.9.9-2    PulseAudio Preferences
ii  pavucontrol                   0.9.9-1    PulseAudio Volume Control
ii  pavumeter                     0.9.3-1    PulseAudio Volume Meter
ii  pulseaudio-utils              0.9.21-1   Command line tools for the PulseAu

-- no debconf information