Lots of underruns in Ubuntu Karmic

[Jeremified]

Stepmania has a ton of underruns on Karmic; is there anything I can do to stop this from happening? I've tried using pasuspender and aoss to start StepMania, but these have no effect, so I'm guessing it's an issue with Alsa or SM itself.

Here's what I think is the significant part of the log.txt file:

00:00.197: Initializing driver: ALSA
00:00.212: ALSA: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.20.
00:00.212: ALSA Driver: 0: HDA Intel [Intel], device 0: STAC92xx Analog [STAC92xx Analog], 1/1 subdevices avail
00:00.699: ALSA error: pcm_hw.c:1325 snd_pcm_hw_open: open /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p failed (Device or resource busy)
00:00.699: Could only create 1 buffers; need at least 8 (failed with dsnd_pcm_open(hw:0): Device or resource busy).  Hardware ALSA driver can't be used.
00:00.699: Couldn't load driver ALSA: Not enough substreams for hardware mixing, using software mixing
00:00.699: Initializing driver: ALSA-sw
00:00.700: OS: Linux ver 020631
00:00.826: ALSA: Software mixing at 44100hz
00:00.954: Starting thread: Decode thread
00:00.954: Starting thread: RageSound_ALSA9_Software
00:00.955: Sound driver: ALSA-sw
00:00.955: Starting thread: MusicThread

After it begins to load songs, I get many of these:

00:01.018: underrun (128 frames)

[DaVince]

Do underruns cause major crackling and stuttering in audio? Because that's what happens for me...

I'll be compiling the latest SVN with that PulseAudio patch to see if it makes a difference.


Note to the devs: StepMania seems to pick up 44100 hz for my sound card, but 48000 Hz would definitely stop all crackling (I know because a different game, EDuke32, had the same effect). Can I force this somewhere, or could it maybe autodetect the best rate, or could I set it up in the program itself? (I've missed options like this in the configuration menu anyway, SM has surprisingly little audio settings options for a music program...)

[shakesoda]

Originally Posted by DaVince

Do underruns cause major crackling and stuttering in audio? Because that's what happens for me...

I'll be compiling the latest SVN with that PulseAudio patch to see if it makes a difference.

If you get the latest SVN you don't need to patch it. I added PulseAudio last night.

Note to the devs: StepMania seems to pick up 44100 hz for my sound card, but 48000 Hz would definitely stop all crackling (I know because a different game, EDuke32, had the same effect). Can I force this somewhere, or could it maybe autodetect the best rate, or could I set it up in the program itself? (I've missed options like this in the configuration menu anyway, SM has surprisingly little audio settings options for a music program...)

SoundPreferredSampleRate=0 -> SoundPreferredSampleRate=48000

[DaVince]

Thanks. :) Should be an option inside the program, I think!

[Jeremified]

Originally Posted by shakesoda

If you get the latest SVN you don't need to patch it. I added PulseAudio last night.

How do I get the latest SVN? I tried compiling it myself yesterday, but it seems to have built it for Windows instead of Linux. Did I do something wrong?

[Jeremified]

Okay, I got it to compile correctly... but now it occasionally causes the entire screen to glitch up a LOT. It seems like the monitor becomes horizontally out-of-sync (and there's blocks of garbage everywhere), and what's weirder is that by moving the mouse I can control how fast the screen rotates. o_O Where would I look to find the exact error message produced here?

Also, killing StepMania and gdm didn't help; I had to force-reboot.

Edit:

02:05.156: //////////////////////////////////////////////////////

02:05.156: Exception: Fatal I/O error communicating with X server.

02:05.156: //////////////////////////////////////////////////////

This must be significant.

[howl]

Exception: Fatal I/O error communicating with X server. only means that the StepMania window was close before StepMania itself tried to close the window. You can reproduce it playing in window mode and closing the window with the X icon.

[Jeremified]

The same exact thing happens when running StepMania 3.9 under Wine (as opposed to 4.0a under Ubuntu), so now I'm almost certain it's a problem with the way Xorg handles fullscreen applications now. (Edit: other full-screen apps don't have this problem, so it's SM after all.)

[howl]

I have been looking at the X11 part of the code os StepMania and it uses an old method to get FullScreen but anyway still a valid method nowadays. What Window Manager are you using?

[DaVince]

I found that setting SoundWriteAhead=2048 gets rid of all crackling and popping on my PC, this could prevent underruns too. You might want to play around with the value a bit (512 actually made the popping worse for me).