Update: this doesn’t appear to solve the problem 100%, but I am experiencing it much less often.
Enhancing my love/hate relationship (towards the ‘hate’ side) with Ubuntu is a nasty audio glitch introduced in Karmic for some Intel sound cards. Different people describe it differently: I’ve heard it described as random ‘popping,’ but my symptom is more like ‘laptop randomly starts sounding like a garbage disposal until you run $>killall pulseaudio’. I’ll be listening to an MP3 through Banshee, and randomly when it goes to the next track, every subsequent sound will sound like a train wreck until I kill the pulseaudio process. Some MP3s are more consistent than others with this problem.
Either way, I’ve found a potential fix for this problem. Here goes:
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Open the ALSA configuration file using GEdit as root from the terminal:
user@computer:$ gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf -
At the very end, you should find a line that looks like this:
# Power down HDA controllers after 10 idle seconds
options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=NYou want to comment out the line starting with ‘options,’ so that it looks like this:
# Power down HDA controllers after 10 idle seconds
#options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N -
Save the file and restart Pulseaudio by running:
user@computer:$ killall pulseaudio
That should solve your sound problems.
