[Bug] Microphone/Audio crackly on voice chat (inbound and outbound) #6747
Comments
System Information
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whats your ISP & download/upload speed? i dont doubt its possibly a steam issue if discord etc works fine |
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lol VoIP uses ~64kbps in both directions, even if STEAM uses double that, bandwidth will never be a problem. But, just to be clear, 300mbps down, 15mbps up. Yes I have good ping and routing to STEAM servers. The STEAM server configuration is just for downloading of content, not VoIP (which is P2P btw). |
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This sounds like an issue with buffer underruns along the audio pathway somewhere. Could it be PulseAudio related? As a note, I've experienced the same issue. I'm going to try increasing my PulseAudio buffer size later, and see if that fixes it. |
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I'm experiencing the same issue using a 3.5mm analog headset on Manjaro; as for whether Pulseaudio is to blame, I have verified the microphone works correctly using arecord & aplay. There is no When loading the Pulseaudio loopback-module, a light echo can be heard & audio output is delayed by ~200ms; but these are bugs specific to the loopback-module & largely unrelated to Steam's distortions. Testing ALSA directly by disabling Pulseaudio, the loopback function doesn't have any delay, & the echo isn't there (but Steam still suffers from this regardless). Recording with Pulseaudio doesn't produce the echo observed from the loopback-module as evidenced with Kwave. Voice logs/ALSA info will be provided if requested/needed. There is more to this than the microphone though; notification sounds from Steam sound like they're from a blender filled with gravel (separate issue; cause/solution at bottom). No other software on my system suffers from Steam's unique audio distortions (i.e., echo, crackling, noise, muddy); L4D2 voice chat in-game sounds better than Steam's current chat implementation (but it still sounds noisy/muddy, just no horrible echo). Echo is terrible regardless of settings in Steam chat; turning off "Noise Cancellation" helped modestly with overall sound quality. At times, the echo & distortions will lead to a cochlea-destroying feedback loop. Other advanced settings managed to make it worse than stock behavior. I should mention that the issue is most prominent when gain is above 50%. Failed Attempts:
This issue also affects my laptop which uses a different codec (i.e., ALC255 I believe) when using the internal microphone through steam. This isn't specific to ALC1220 codecs. Since this issue is affecting more than specifically Ubuntu, I'd advise removing the Distro Family label. Additionally, the distortion from Steam's audio notifications is caused by Pulseaudio in some fashion; ALSA direct (i.e., with Pulseaudio disabled) had no garbled notification sounds. System Specs: inxi & Steam |
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I've been running into this issue as well. I found simply opening the chat in the browser window addresses the issue, so it's definitely specific to the steam client. It would be nice to be able to use the more lightweight Steam client, since games don't like running along side scalable memory footprint programs like web browsers, and don't know how to cue them to reduce their memory footprint. |
@Ruedii how does one do this? I frequently use the Steam voice chat and am looking for a workaround. |
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I see this in Arch, so it definitely isn't just Ubuntu. Discord and Mumble also work for me, so it isn't that. I saw in my steam log errors that may be relevant: I noticed in pavucontrol that steam voice chat shows up as chromium, so I'm guessing it is based on chromium. When I googled the PushPullFIFO error I stumbled upon this chromium bug that affects linux and mac: |
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i'm having the same problem on Gentoo. Failed Attempts:
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Mint 19.3, kernel 5.3.x and 5.6.11 + Ryzen 5 3600, B450, rx580 and sound card is USB headset (C-Media Multimedia Headset). Happens every time I play with friends :( Same as others, only Steam chat is affected, every other application I use works just fine. |
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Can we get some VALVe involvement here already? |
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Happens on windows too, when linux user speaks with windows user. My input and output crackles, windows user hears crackles too. |
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I created a new user in linux and discovered that it does not show the problem. I haven't found out which file or setting in my user profile is responsible yet. |
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can confim what @XakepSDK says: |
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Ok, after some more testing I discovered some new information. I'm using pulseaudio with unmodified default configs in /etc/pulse. In gnome-control-center I have my input device set to my webcam mic and the output device set to my analog headphone. In steam I have the input device set as 'default'. If I set the output device as 'default' then the sound crackles. If however I set the output device directly for my analog headphone then in the steam microphone test my voice starts out a low pitch with crackles but after 30 seconds the pitch normalizes and the crackling stops. |
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Also have this bug on Gentoo. Both input and output crackle. |
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Hello. I'm gonna add my contribution to this bug and confirming a temporary fix. System details : https://pastebin.com/TW2xGKQ4 I have the same artifact issue on Steam. This bug do not exist with other software (sound recorder or mumble). As @baraclese said, I tried, and it actually works. Going into options, changing default to the actual device you use both for input and output remove artifacts. |
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Can confirm that @baraclese workaround the crackling is reduced a little bit but in my case it is still very perceptible. EDIT: I tried to move the gain sliders and the problem is almost gone. |
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I just setup jackaudio with jacksink pulseaudio plugin and the problem is fixed. I figured out somewhere in this thread: Its counterintuitive that pulseaudio on top of jack has better latency than just pulseaudio by itself. I had the same problem with Dirt Rally linux native game. This is of course not a fix but a workaround but al least I can play with my friends. I hope valve will fix the audio drop outs. So: Failed Attempts:
Succeeded Attempts:
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I honestly don't know why VALVe is taking so long to fix a bug like this. It's just so bad that I don't even use STEAM voice any more at all and haven't done so for months. This is completely unusable. |
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@kisak-valve I am willing to help but I don't know where is the documentation for ticket priority. This ticket affects 100% of Linux users so for my point of view is P1. I would appreciate if you share what are the rules for creating QA environments and what are the correlation between valve's priority list and user's impact. Thanks for doing such a great product, we can make better together. |
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Hello @mercuriete, friendly note that I'm a moderator helping out on Valve's Github issue trackers and not a Valve dev myself. I don't have any greater influence on what issues Valve devs prioritize at any given time. |
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ok, thanks for your work anyways 👍 |
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@kisak-valve your work is most definitely appreciated! In all the GitHub and otherwise stuff! |
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I can confirm this issue with an analogue microphone under Lubuntu 20.04 on an MSI B350 Tomahawk motherboard. I tried several of the pulseaudio settings to no avail, but @baraclese's workaround works for me as well. However as opposed to #6747 (comment), only the output had an influence. Changing the input did nothing. |
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@kisak-valve I don't know if the "Distro Family: Ubuntu" tag is needed, since this bug is not limited to Ubuntu, since it is also reported on ArchLinux (as it is for me). |
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Here is my summary: The issue I hear and that is heard at the other side (I play with my brother who is on Windows) is a crackle, as if the stream was hitting the end of every audio chunk sooner than expected, giving a choppy result (imagine an audio stream that would pass on a chop board). As many, I've tried using the runtime libraries and the native libraries to no improvement. Using the same setup under Windows works without any mic/audio issue. Is there an audio bot we can test against? And is there any way to downgrade Steam Client to a previous version and to help find out when the bug appeared (I would suggest to bissect the code, but I think downgrading far enough and moving foward is the closest thing we can do in a closed source program). If I can test anything or provide any log, let me know. |
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@Oxalin I don't know of an audio bot, but using the microphone test function plays your audio back to you and I at least had the impression that it includes the crackling and reduction thereof when using the workaround mentioned above. |
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I have installed pipewrite pulseaudio and configured it like said here; no cracking sound; no audio or voice in 32bit games btw |
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I experience the same stuttering issues with Steam voice and csgo. A lot of steam games work without issues though. |
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I'm experiencing the same issue, however I was able to play online and have a conversation for a good 20 minutes before the sound suddenly started crackling for no reason. |
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Yeah I still get this, and I have just flat out stopped using STEAM Voice completely. It's completely unreliable and just sounds like garbage. |
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I tried for a while to get people to join my Steam Group voice chat Vs jumping into Mumble (perfect) or Discord (perfect) but due to audio sounding choppy both in and out, it's a no go. Steam is up to date on Manjaro and even the bios is updated but Steam voice is truly clearly broken. When voice works in L4D2, it works fine. But voice chat in Steam is broken and has been for a while now. |
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The fix outlined here applied to |
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Well that might work, but users shouldn't have to fix pulseaudio daemon config parameters just to be able to use VoIP on STEAM. Especially when every other single VoIP program already works fine on Linux. This is a VALVe problem. |
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Just going to say that this is still a problem. Though interestingly enough, this problem goes away if I use pipewire instead of pulseaudio. And I have no idea why. |
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@Charadon since I instaled pipewire I didn't notice any audio crackling anymore. |
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Issue is, most static distributions either don't use pipewire, support an older version of pipewire, or support using pipewire but it's a pain to get running. And I personally still use pulseaudio as applications like OBS were giving me issues when using pipewire, so I went back to pulseaudio. Steam was really the only application that benfitted from using pipewire. |
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Wait, this is still broken? What a joke. This is the ONLY VoIP program I have ever seen to have this issue. And I'm losing track of how many VoIP apps I use or have used. |
And the weird part, is that barely anyone talks about it. Do that few people actually use the steam chat feature? |
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@Charadon off-topic... |
I would say very few people use the voice aspect of STEAM chat. I for one gave up years ago because of this crackling, I just don't have time waiting around for a problem to be fixed that shouldn't have existed in the first place. |
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I confirm the bug on Debiean, i thought this was solved time ago. |
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I think a good way of figuring this out what's causing this, is to provide what our /etc/pulse/ config files are. So here's mine: client.conf.txt Since github doesn't allow uploading .conf files, you'll have to add .txt to the end of their names. I made a handy shell command to do this. Then the outputted .txt files will be in your home folder. Maybe someone will show up where they don't have this problem, and we can compare our pulseaudio config files and figure out what's different. |
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The way I solved this for my particular setup (OpenSUSE, generic USB microphone), in case this is helpful to someone else stumbling upon this: I noticed a significant reduction of the mic crackle rate when changing my PulseAudio config value I suspect you could achieve the same with an even higher sample rate, using a larger buffer, but in my case this introduced unacceptably high audio latency, so I went with the lower sample rate. To test these changes (for CS:GO/Source engine at least, as this was my use case), run a local map with Anecdotally, in case it's relevant, I'm also using a realtime kernel patchset with appropriate PA config settings because of other music related stuff I use the PC for, but I highly doubt this is necessary/relevant at all for the vast majority of use cases; the sample rate + buffer size (not only fragment size, but num. fragments as well) seem like the much more likely culprits. |
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Another experience: |
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I had a new headset (Corsair hs65 Surround) and noticed this problem on my main computer, I tried the headset on my steam deck and it seemed to be fine. I ran in Not sure if switching to pulseaudio on pipewire was strictly necessary for this fix, I don't remember if I tried my headset with float32le before swapping to pulseaudio on pipewire but this issue seems to be fixed (but requires further testing) which I will do in one of my next chat sessions with buddies. I had previously tested switching pulseaudio with default-sample-rate = 48000 and 44100 without restarting but using and tried setting as was suggested in this steam topic
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I tried screwing around with pulseaudio like many others to no avail. Switching to PipeWire a while back with a simple |
Oh lord, this is still an issue on steam? I mean, it's a good thing pipewire has swooped in to save the day, but it's ridiculous that a bug I could reproduce on literally every device i've ever owned was never fixed by valve themselves. |
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It may actually be an issue with pulseaudio that no one has ever tried to fix directly, instead opting to workaround it within their own apps or happening to not trigger it in the first place. Doom Eternal would sometimes crackle with pulseaudio and the only workaround I found was to restart the game until it happened to not crackle. I have not played Doom Eternal much after installing PipeWire to know if this intermittent issue is still ever present, but I just launched it a couple times and there was no crackle. This might still be blamed on Steam though since it is launching the game. |
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I honestly gave up on this crap (STEAM's Voice Chat) years ago. I have other tools I can use that actually work, since you know, VoIP is already a solved problem. I don't even know why they include this as a feature if they don't even give a damn about it even working. What a waste of time. |
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@BloodyIron Probably because it exists in the Windows (and Mac, I would expect) version, where it doesn't have the issues we experience, and it would be weird to remove a feature for one specific kernel/OS... |
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I have the same issue on EndeavourOS with pipewire & Blue Yeti. Changing the input and output to not the defaults helps but is still very crackly, |
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I have switched my hardware by accident from a more than ten years old i5 3570k to a newer CPU, motherboard and RAM. That shouldn't mean that everyone has to to go out and buy new hardware to be able to do voice chat. I just don't want to hold back the experiences I made. |
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I didn't reinstall, but reused my existing arch installation. |
and others
I'll post my Steam Information in a reply.
When I use STEAM voice chat, the output (speakers/headphones) and input (microphone) is crackly.
It crackles when I hear what other people are saying, and when people listen to what I say into my mic, they say that's crackly too (or breaks up).
When I use other VoIP tools, like Riot.im or Discord, I do not get the same issue.
This has been persistent for many months now, and I'm very confident this is a STEAM bug. This has also persisted across different hardware and major versions of Ubuntu, for me.
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