hundreds of xruns in under a minute...

sonicbhoc

Well, my laptop has been giving me problems with sound as some of you may already know: when you plug in headphones, the stereo speakers on the laptop don't shut off. I thought that this would be the end of my sound problems and everything else would be a minor annoyance.

Unfortunately, this is not the case... I started jackd to see if I could get to work on some music production. I even inquired over at the ocremix.org forums to see if anyone had any tips for a poor Linux-running remixer who wanted to get into the mix. It started spitting out hundreds of xruns (hundreds, as in a plural) in minutes. I was astounded. I booted into my realtime kernel and it didn't help things. Jackd keeps giving hundreds of xruns... so I turned down the Sample Rate and jacked up the Frames/Period. It still happens regularly, and unfortunately I can hit about 30 or so xruns in a minute at 387msecs of latency. Heck, it gives xruns before the log can even start. It's saddening... looks like my production is going to be stuck to my crappy box! How... discouraging. Some info:

alsa driver built into kernel 2.6.21-rc5

jack-audio-connection-kit 0.103.0 (alsa -altivec caps -coreaudio -debug -doc -freebob -jack-tmpfs jackmidi -mmx -netjack -oss -portaudio -sndfile -sse) (mmx and sse are unselectable on my system)

sound card

Truin · n00b Joined: 05 Jul 2006 Posts: 54

Whoa - this is a major pandora's box.

I've done quite a bit of recording in linux, using jackd and rosegarden, and certainly xruns are a pain in the butt.

While I could go over a host of things that could be contributing to the xruns, the easiest 'will it work at all?' fix I can think of is to grab the Studio2Go! software demo from http://www.ferventsoftware.com. If the demo works for ya, and you can get the xruns down, then you at least know it's possible and the problem is in your configuration some where. (Who knows - you might like S2G - I love it!)

Side note - I don't know what all you need for audio in/out, but I use the M-Audio USB FastTrack Pro. You can find it, and other audio products, at their web site http://www.m-audio.com.

G'Luck!
-=Truin=-

sonicbhoc · Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 3:10 pm Post subject: Re: jackd and xruns

gimpel · Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 3:30 pm Post subject:

- compile jack with USE="jack-tmpfs mmx sse"
- run it in realtime (using PAM RLimits for user rights)
- don't set the latency too low for your sound chip
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sonicbhoc · Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 3:35 pm Post subject:

gimpel · Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 4:53 pm Post subject:

sonicbhoc · Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 6:20 pm Post subject:

Oh... $100, you say? I'll try to rake that much money together, my parents don't want me spending any money on stuff. They want me to put all of the 200 dollars I got from my birthday into the bank.
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gimpel · Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 10:53 pm Post subject:

A fellow on IRC has the same problem with jack 0.103 on a 64bit system, using a SB Live 5.1 platinum which is known to work quite well at 128 frames/period.

So, I think this might be a heavy bug in jack 0.103 regarding 64bit.

With your intel onboard chip you should also be able to run jack with 256 frames/period.
So, maybe even buying a better sound device won't help.
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sonicbhoc · Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 11:49 pm Post subject:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Oh no! I really don't want to recompile everything back into 32-bits... what should I do?
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gimpel · Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 12:02 am Post subject:

sonicbhoc · Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 12:43 am Post subject:

Akkara · Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 2:05 am Post subject:

amd64 dualcore, running x86_64 here works good with buffer sizes down to 64 x2, no xruns unless I push the machine hard.

It definitely saw its ups and downs however. Seems some versions of jack and some versions of the kernel simply don't like each other.

Currently using:
m-audio audiophile 2496 (ICE1712 chipset).
jack-audio-connection-kit-0.102.20
2.6.19-gentoo-r5 compiled with CONFIG_PREEMPT=y, CONFIG_PREEMPT_BKL=y, CONFIG_HZ=1000, CONFIG_IOSCHED_CFQ=y
realtime_lsm module (been planning to try pam but havn't had a chance yet)

sonicbhoc · Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 2:50 am Post subject:

Well, my setup is as follows:

Integrated Intel HDA Sound (model ASUS)
Realtime Kernel - rt-kernel-2.6.21-rc5, full preemption
Jack Audio Connection Kit 0.103.0 <<--- could be the problem?
using /etc/security/limits.conf from PAM

Well, I'll see about downgrading jack... all of my stuff is from the pro-audio overlay, which is where I got that new version of JACK. PAM's /etc/security/limits.conf actually works quite well and I didn't have to change anything - it was automatically configured to give users of the audio group special privileges and stuff.

I just burned studio2go onto a CD. It looked pretty interesting from those screen shots on the website, but after spending my time with Gentoo I'm not about to install that over this, especially because I have no money to buy it. :wink:

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I'm too lazy to keep this stupid signature up to date, so here's something more interesting:
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FishB8 · l33t Joined: 17 Mar 2003 Posts: 820

If you have a string of non-stop xruns as soon as you start jack, the problem is probably your setup and not a compiling issue.

First, does your device have digtal IOs? If you are running jack on a device or sub-device with digital IOs and they are not connected to anything, then they are probably going crazy trying to detect a sync signal.

Try turning off the realtime option and see if you still get xruns.

Also:
sse and mmx are available on your CPU, see the readout from your CPU info under "flags". 64 bit had nothing to do with that.
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sonicbhoc · Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 3:35 am Post subject:

TenPin · Guru Joined: 26 Aug 2002 Posts: 500 Location: Kansas City

I basically have the same computer as you sonicbhoc and I have exactly the same problem. I'm used to setting up jack to work and have deduced that the problem is with the hda-intel soundcard driver.

I have the SigmaTel STAC9200 chipset.
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sonicbhoc · Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 12:31 pm Post subject:

GNUtoo · Veteran Joined: 05 May 2005 Posts: 1919

Ingmarv · Posted: Sun May 20, 2007 9:11 am Post subject:

In Jack, if you're using the intel-hda driver, you have to set the number of periods to n=3, not 2. That'll solve the shitload-of-xruns-problem for you.

It's a known problem with the driver. I haven't been following the development all that close, so there might already be a fix for this. It's been roughly 6 months since I stumbled on this, and I can tell you that it took quite a while to figure out the culprit.

GNUtoo · Veteran Joined: 05 May 2005 Posts: 1919

sonicbhoc · Posted: Mon May 21, 2007 2:51 am Post subject:

still getting a billion xruns if I put -n3 before -dalsa. If I put -dalsa first, and then put -n3 I get this:

gimpel · Posted: Mon May 21, 2007 6:58 am Post subject:

You have to put -n3 after -dalsa, as it is an option for the alsa driver. And 41000Hz is not really a standard value. Use 44100 or 48000
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sonicbhoc · Posted: Mon May 21, 2007 11:41 am Post subject:

gimpel · Posted: Mon May 21, 2007 12:04 pm Post subject:

strange, what's your command line now?
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GNUtoo · Veteran Joined: 05 May 2005 Posts: 1919

i used qjackctrl to set the parametrer and it worked