[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#1036586: pipewire-pulse makes audio playback all crackly

[Martin Guy]

I'm not having as bad an experience with pipewire-pulse as others,
but all programs that prefer pulse to alsa, like SoX, worked fine last
Debian release but now are unusable for playback because the audio
comes out crackly, as if it had lots of tiny gaps in it.

Purging pipewire-pulse, installing pulseaudio and rebooting instead,
audio players that try to use it just sit there in silence, don't respond
to Ctrl-C and, if I Ctrl-\ them, I get a 275MB core dump from SoX and
a 504MB one from spettro, instead of their usual 2MB and 270MB ones.

So, of the two... better pipewire but rather neither, though that
renders firefox silent.

The system is a 4-core amd64 thing with 8GB of RAM, so it's not that.
I'd suspect too little default buffering while hoping for low latency,
possibly in libpulse/libpulse-simple/libpulsecommon, which is what
talks to pipewire-pulse.

Best of luck finding and fixing

   M