Skype with pulseaudio has no sound

[viric]

It used to work; in nixpkgs 2e57a16 it doesn't work, with pulseaudio. It either produces noise, or no sound at all.

pavucontrol 2.0 doesn't show the skype stream.

Disabling 'pulseaudio' in the nixpkgs skype parameter, it also does not work here.

Disabling QT_PLUGIN_PATH, and other PLUGIN paths, doesn't improve anything.

In a system with 'hardware.pulseaudio' disabled, the default nixpkgs skype works fine (with a crash at exit, mentioned in #788.

[viric]

A related issue... skype is a 32-bit program; asound.conf includes an alsa module for pulseaudio, which will be only 64-bit in x86_64.

[viric]

Arch issue that may be related: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=163916

[viric]

Similar discussion, in Spanish: http://www.esdebian.org/foro/49496/sonido-distorsionado-skype

[viric]

Ok, I fixed this locally following the instructions in the forum posts above:

  hardware.pulseaudio.configFile = pkgs.runCommand "default.pa" {} ''
    sed 's/module-udev-detect$/module-udev-detect tsched=0/' \
      ${pkgs.pulseaudio}/etc/pulse/default.pa > $out
  '';

[domenkozar]

Also getting this one. @viric should I try default.pa patch?

[viric]

On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 05:11:49AM -0700, Domen Kožar wrote:

Also getting this one. @viric should I try default.pa patch?

uh? I don't know much about pulseaudio. Go on fixing, and if something breaks,
I'll catch up later. :)

[bjornfor]

Direct link to explanation of @viric's fix: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio#Glitches.2C_skips_or_crackling

(Adding tsched=0 fixed my skype audio issues too.)

[bjornfor]

More info about pulseaudio timer-based scheduling (which is disabled with tsched=0): http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/pulse-glitch-free.html

And a workaround for skype (instead of using tsched=0 which affects everyone): http://arunraghavan.net/2013/08/pulseaudio-4-0-and-skype/

Basically, PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 skype.

[bjornfor]

Fixed with b5c1d18