Terrible sound latency with some programs. (Xubuntu)

[Rydian]

It's an eMachines T2899 desktop, FIC AU31 motherboard, nForce2 chipset, AC97 sound (integrated), running Xubuntu 10.04 (wubi install), 2.6.32-22.

I've got terrible sound latency (about one second between actions and sound) in some programs.

Flash in both firefox and chrome (including youtube videos) and ZSNES (SNES emulator) are two offenders, as is Audacity.
Videos played in the default "movie player" and VLC play with no delay, though.

I've been told it could be an issue with the ALSA buffer size, or pulseaudio introducing latency... but I've no clue how to go about fixing it.

Upon using the SNES9X emulator (which allows for choice of sound system)...
Portaudio causes laggy emulation and bad sound latency.
Open Sound System plays fine.
SDL causes laggy emulation and bad sound latency.
ALSA plays fine.
Pulse Audio plays fine.

"sudo apt-get remove --purge pulseaudio" did nothing, so I reinstalled it just in case.

As a note, I'm not very familiar with linux yet, but I will try to gather any information you need.


EDIT: Upon running the following commands, the issue seems partially fixed.

sudo apt-get purge libcanberra-pulse pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat pulseaudio-module-bluetooth pulseaudio-module-gconf pulseaudio-module-udev   pulseaudio-module-x11 gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils pavucontrol 

sudo apt-get install gnome-alsamixer alsa-oss python-alsaaudio

I can now play stepmania and youtube videos with only a slight amount of latency (a tolerable amount for now).

Furthermore upon testing ZSNES, it has zero latency... until I fast-forward, then the latency returns. Going into and then out of the GUI returns the latency to 0.

Upon trying SNES9X...
Portaudio now plays fine.
Open Sound System still plays fine.
SDL now causes intermittent emulation lag, though it's not totally unusable like before.
ALSA no longer plays fine, there's intermittent stuttering.
Pulse Audio plays no sound at all, of course.

There's also annoying/random popping in audio I'd like fixed as well.

[Rydian]

Bumping this from page two.

[rokytnji]

Have you looked through This thread at Ubuntu Forums?

Comprehensive Sound Problem Solutions Guide - Ubuntu Forums

This one below is also a very good reference for setting up sound in Ubuntu and Debian. I have used it to trouble shoot sounds in My Ubuntu Boxes.

[ubuntu] snd_hda_intel options database - Ubuntu Forums

Last but not least

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Sound

[Rydian]

The first is for getting sound to work at all (which isn't the issue), the second doesn't list anything about my machine and doesn't explain what the options do (so I can't really make my own other than guessing and testing a ton of combinations), and again the third is for getting sound working in the first place, which isn't the issue.

The "IntelHDASoundHowTo" Seemed promising at first, but it's info is quite out of date and I simply cannot do what it's asking due to either the files it mentions not existing, or the info it tells me to look up not existing.

The only thing I got out of that was a model number (which I had to look for myself), ALC650F... and none of the pages seem to list that model.

[rokytnji]

Since your sound works. You might want to check out hda-verb utility. Just google it.

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubu...are-enablement

You are going to have to research this stuff. I have good working sound on my Ubuntu and AntiX boxes with no lag what so ever but all my Hardware is either IBM or Asus. So I have no experience like what you are experiencing,
I have had to fix broken no sound issues after a apt-get upgrade using Debian Sidux Repos. But never had a delay in sound after getting my sound working.
You can look at the comments section in that link and read

Karen's laptop's internal speakers distort whenever she listens to music or watches video. The utility detects a missing 0 dB cap for her HDA codec SSID and applies an hda-verb command. Karen is happy because her sound is no longer distorted under normal playback conditions. (Optionally, a git changeset is generated for sound-2.6 master HEAD.)

It is all greek to me. If you want to find your sound card info

Open terminal and type in (you might need to prefix lspci command with sudo)

aplay -l

or

lspci -v

Mine

Audio:     Card Intel 82801CA/CAM AC'97 Audio Controller driver Intel ICH at ports 1c00 18c0 BusID: 00:1f.5
           Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Version 1.0.21