Audio "glitch" or buffer underrun based on Gnome updating display

[bitmux]

I'm hearing an audio 'glitch' (click) every few seconds and it seems to be tied to gnome updating the display.

OS: POP!_OS 20.04 with latest updates, stock pulse-audio configuration
Audio device: doesn't seem to matter, both internal speaker/headphone and an external USB interface exhibit the issue.

Gnome extension which caused me to notice the issue: Freon. Each time the statistics in Freon would update the audio would click/skip samples.
Disabling this extension reduced the frequency of the 'click' but did not remove it completely. I assume other gnome screen updates are responsible.

Audio played via Firefox browser from Pandora website does NOT exhibit this issue.

I then attempted to switch the sample rate, 44.1khz, 48khz, and on the USB external interface by editing / 96khz as well, this did NOT seem to have any effect, the issue remains.

[TingPing]

This really has nothing to do with Pithos. It is likely some complication in GStreamer or pulseaudio which isn't easy to track down most likely.

Firefox does not use GStreamer.

[bitmux]

Fair enough, will test further down the Gstreamer path, thanks!!

[uvuch]

I have kind of the same problem. Well, may be not exactly the same. In my case I can hear lost samples. Listening to Pandora on Debian(Buster) machine. No problems with the sound when I listen to MP3s on my local hard drive with mpg123. PLEX client (https://knapsu.eu/plex) brings no issues too. Note, it is a standalone PLEX-client, not Firefox one. So far I could hear the lost samples only in Pithos. And it happens not very often to me, about 1-2 times in 5-10 mins. But bear with me, I am not trying to blame Pithos. Just a bit annoying issue I'd like to find remedy for.

Update: it happened that in my case I had no pulseaudio installed at all. The application was working with ALSA directly as I can understand. And after I have it installed now I see no issues so far with Pithos.

[TingPing]

The best step to reproduce is using the gst-launch-1.0 tool.

This does not exactly do what Pithos does but a simple test would be: gst-launch-1.0 -v playbin uri=file:///path/to/somefile.mp3

[Nam-Ram]

TingPing - do you mean playing an MP3 using gst should generate the same issue?

Having a similar if not the exact same issue. It's only Pithos, and will get mini pops usually when clicking on a new window. Unfortunately, I have the volume low but the pops seem to be full volume so it's a bit jarring. I've tried videos through various browsers (Chrome, Brave, Firefox), Plex, VLC, and it only happens while Pithos is playing. Sometimes it's a few times per min, depends if I'm active or not. My sound stack is a bit of a mess and I'm about to redo it all, based on uvuch's comment maybe that'll fix it - I'll report back when I finish doing all that.

Running LMDE 4 with Debian "Buster"