A better sounding world

As part of the Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day initiative, I’d like to write an appreciation for females – of all ages – that we have within Ubuntu and upstream communities, and why I’d like to see more of the same. To do this, I’ve taken the liberty of generalising a bit based on my own personal experiences.

First off, many women have excellent communication and conflict resolution skills. I envision this could come to very good use, including upstream. You see, we software developers can be really picky – which is a good thing, as long as this helps us prevent bugs. But we also tend to set up rules for ourselves and our processes, and we need a counterweight to that in order not to become rule-following robots, which is no fun. A controversial patch can easily lead to heated, discouraging debates and somebody running off, making a fork of the project, together with half of the squad. Seen from an Ubuntu perspective, better communication and conflict resolution skills might help us to maintain fewer remixes and derivatives – but the remaining ones would be more polished and work better.

Second, a mixed company working place is good for everyone. Before working at Canonical, I had been working at both offices with only men, and with both men and women. My experience was that at the male-only office, discussions tended to be more matcho – coffee break chats were often about sports or women, if I remember correctly. And even if background images of women in bikini and jokes towards the vulgar didn’t offend me, I didn’t particularly enjoy it either.
At the mixed company working place, discussions in general had a friendlier tone, and included a wider area of topics. It was just…better.
(Side note: while discussing this with a female colleague a long time ago, she told me she had been working at a women-only place, which was plagued by gossiping to the extent that she was afraid to become ill – because on the day she would not be at work, they would gossip about her. Judging from that, mixed company is likely good for everyone, not just men.)

Third, women know what women want. Or, at least, are slightly more likely to know. Software is more likely to get new features, bug fixes, packaging, support, advertising blog posts and so on, if there are people with sufficient skill and interest in that particular software. When more women get involved in software development, the end result will be more useful for women. If Ubuntu’s ever going to reach 200 million users: if it works great for twice as many people, that would certainly help!

So, I would like to say thank you to all women involved in open source communities, both Ubuntu and upstream. That includes a thank you for not quitting when times get rough.

And finally, if I may extend my appreciation to an invitation: you don’t have to be as fantastic as the open source women I’ve met, to be contributing to Ubuntu, Debian, or upstream. If you already have skills, that helps, but for the most part, you’ll learn as you go. Commit to respecting each other first, and then you can start helping out with everything from writing code to organizing events. Welcome!

Disclaimer: As usual, these are my own views rather than those of my employer, my family, or anyone else. Also, just to make the point clear, this is not scientific research and does not claim that women are in general different from men – we all are so much different from, and so much more than, what an average person of the same gender would be. It is just my “thank you” post, based on my own personal experiences.

[Thanks to Leann Ogasawara for providing some useful feedback when writing this blog post.]

The first PulseAudio conference is approaching quickly. This is a shoutout for people who might be interested, but missed the mailinglist announcement.

The conference will be Friday 2nd November 2012, and colocated with Ubuntu Developer Summit and Linaro Connect, in Bella Center, Copenhagen.

There is no attendance fee, but you’ll need a UDS or LC registration (which are also free) to be able to get into the conference area. (Note: LC might be the safer bet here as UDS ends on Thursday)

There had been a few topics brought up on the mailinglist, but we welcome anyone who would like to contribute to constructive discussions and help to shape the future of PulseAudio!

If you would like to attend, how about you write an email to the pulseaudio-discuss mailinglist with the topic(s) you want to bring up, and maybe a small presentation with your background and interests? Of course, if you mostly want to listen in rather than bring your own topics, that’s okay too!

The audio stack in Linux/Ubuntu evolves over time. What used to be good advice is not necessarily good advice anymore. (That also means, that if you happen to read this blog post in 2019 or something, don’t trust it!)
Here are some things that people try, and sometimes they even fix the problem, but are often bad in one way or the other. Or at least, they have side effects one needs to be aware of. So – while there are valid exceptions, as a rule of thumb, don’t do the following:

5. Don’t add your user to the “audio” group

A user has access to the audio card if that person is either logged in – both VT and GUI login counts, but not SSH logins, or if that user is in the “audio” group. However, on the level of access we’re talking about here, only one user has access at a time. So the typical problem scenario goes like:

• User Homer has an audio issue, and tries to fix it by adding himself to the audio group. This doesn’t help to resolve the problem.
• Homer discovers his audio is muted, and unmutes it. Happy to have his audio issue resolved, he forgets he’s still in the audio group, or doesn’t realise it leads to problems.
• User Marge comes and wants to borrow the computer. Homer does a fast-user-switching so Marge can log in.
• Because Homer is in the audio group, he has still access to the audio device. If some software, e g PulseAudio, has the audio device opened, it blocks access to other software trying to use it.
• Now Marge has an audio issue!

I’ve written a longer article about the audio group here. In short, there are some usages for it, including that it is also the standard group name for assigning realtime priorities when used together with JACK. But don’t leave a user in the audio group unless you have a good reason.

4. Don’t try different “model” strings

A common way to try to get HDA Intel soundcards to work is to edit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and add the following line:

options snd-hda-intel model=[something]

…where [something] are values you find in some file. Contrary to official documentation, this is in most cases obsolete. In particular, avoid model=generic – that is almost guaranteed to give you trouble. In many cases, when trying different models, you will find that you might fix one thing but break another.
In fact, there is only one model to try, and that is model=auto. If your machine happen to be one of those quirked to use an older model parser, changing to model=auto can improve the situation.

Instead do:
It still happens that BIOS/UEFI assigns the wrong values to pin nodes, which causes an output or input not to work correctly. If so, I recommend trying to tweak this with hda-jack-retask.
In some cases, trying different modules can actually be okay – sometimes, these models point to lightweight fixups instead of the earlier, more heavyweight code that was used in previous kernels. (In this context, I have to mention that Takashi Iwai has done a fantastic job of converting the older models to the newer auto-parser.)

3. Don’t upgrade ALSA drivers by following random blog posts

I’ve seen far too many people reporting bugs on Launchpad where they’ve been following some random blog post that tells you how to upgrade ALSA, and are having audio issues as a result. These guides are of varying quality and often come without good uninstall instructions, so you have no way to revert in case the upgrade did not solve your problem, or broke something else.

First, something not everybody is aware of: 95% of ALSA code is in the kernel, and follows the kernel’s release cycle. That means that even if “/proc/asound/version” says something that was released a year or two ago, don’t panic. It’s the kernel release that tells you how new your sound drivers are, so if you have a new kernel, and you see an ALSA release coming out, you are unlikely to gain from an upgrade.

Instead do:
In some case you do have an old kernel, and newer sound drivers can be worth a try. The Ubuntu Audio Developer’s team provides daily snapshot drivers for HDA Intel cards. Guide is available here and it also comes with proper uninstall instructions.
In the past we have also provided drivers for other cards, but due to the maintenance required to keep this up-to-date, in combination with that the vast majority of people’s bugs concern HDA Intel anyway, this support has been discontinued.

2. Don’t purge PulseAudio

First, PulseAudio itself isn’t perfect, some of the bindings to PulseAudio aren’t perfect, and some of the drivers are not perfect in the way PulseAudio wants to use it either. So there might be valid reasons to temporarily move it out of your way, even if it would be better to actually fix the problem and submit a bug fix patch (if you’re capable of doing so).
But don’t try uninstalling the PulseAudio package, as it has far too many dependencies.

Instead do:
If you just need direct access to your sound card, you can run the “pasuspender” command. You can either run “pasuspender” (in a terminal) to make PulseAudio stay away for the duration of the application. Or if you think that’s simpler, just run “pasuspender bash” (in a terminal), start your application through the menu/dash/whatever you prefer, and when you’re done, write “exit” in the terminal.
If you need to stop the PulseAudio process completely, execute these commands:

echo autospawn=no > ~/.pulse/client.conf
pulseaudio -k

If you need PulseAudio back again, remove ~/.pulse/client.conf, then try to start an application that uses PulseAudio, and it should start automatically.

Unexpected side effects:

• The Gnome sound settings, the sound indicator and the volume up/down keys relies on PulseAudio, so they won’t work when PulseAudio is off.
• PulseAudio mixes audio, so that means that only one application at a time can output audio if PulseAudio is disabled (and you aren’t using some other sound server).
• Several applications have PulseAudio backends. Some of them will need reconfiguration to use ALSA directly, some will just automatically redirect themselves, and some won’t work at all.
• Bluetooth audio might not work without PulseAudio.

1. Don’t replace ALSA with OSS

OSS was the standard used before ALSA came along. These days, ALSA is much better, both when it comes to hardware support, and when it comes to how much software that supports outputting sound to either sound system. OSS is also entirely unsupported, at least by Ubuntu. In addition, I’m not sure exactly how to get back to a working system after you’ve tried OSS…!

Instead do:
If you know your problem is in ALSA, either drivers or userspace, try to track down and/or fix the bug, and talk to us about it. If you’re running Ubuntu, file a bug against the alsa-driver package. You can also contact the alsa-devel mailinglist. While we won’t guarantee responses due to the high volume of bugs/traffic, we are often able to help out.

Final notes

Note 1. HDA Intel cards are the built-in audio inputs and outputs on your motherboard (at least if you bought your computer after ~2006 or so). HDMI and DisplayPort audio are also HDA Intel cards, but they are covered in more detail here.

Note 2. I have had some problems with spammers posting spam comments to my blog post. I don’t want to spend too much time just reading spam and marking it as such, so I might close for comments in a relatively short period. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Are you:

• Missing speakers or internal mic in sound settings?
• Seeing a S/PDIF device show up for your USB device?
• Having no or extremely low sound from your internal microphone?

If so, I might need your help to be able to fix it for you!

In Ubuntu 12.04 – and very likely, other recent distribution releases as well – there are at least these three audio bugs that need manual quirking for every machine. This means that you submit your hardware info in the meta-bug, I will look in that info for some ID numbers and include them in a list of devices for which a specific workaround has to be applied. We can’t apply the workaround for every device, as that could potentially cause problems for other devices.

So if you’re suffering from one of the bugs I’m describing below, I could use your help to make sure they are fixed for future releases of Ubuntu and ALSA/PulseAudio.

Missing speakers or internal mic in sound settings

If you’re suffering from one of the following problems:

1) In the sound settings dialog, when you plug your headphones into the designated 3.5 mm jack, there is a “Headphones” device correctly shown, but when you unplug it, there is no “Speaker” device shown, even though you have internal speakers on your computer.

2) In the sound settings dialog, when you plug your external microphone into the designated 3.5 mm jack, there is a “Microphone” (or similar) device correctly shown, but when you unplug it, there is no “Internal Mic” device shown, even though you have an internal mic on your computer.

Then you might be suffering from bug 946232. Please look in that bug for your device in that list, and if it is not there, try the workaround and if it’s working, add your alsa-info as suggested in the bug. Thanks!

S/PDIF device showing up for your USB device

If you have a USB headset, or another USB device that does not have any S/PDIF output, but yet sometimes there is an extra device called “Digital Output (S/PDIF)” for that device in Sound Preferences. If so, you’re likely suffering from bug 1002952. At the time of this writing there are also a few devices that are on their way to becoming fixed, if you have one of these, please help out with testing the proposed repository. There is more information in bug 1002952 about that.

Inverted Internal Mic

In this case, you have an internal mic showing up, but it seems not to work: it’s either completely silent, or you can possibly pick a very small sound, with much background noise, even though you have set gain to maximum.

There is something you could try. Install the pavucontrol application, start it and go to the “Input Devices” tab. Unlock the channels (click the keylock icon), then mute the right channel while keeping the left channel at the volume you want.
If the internal mic is now working correctly, you have an inverted internal mic, so that your right channel cancels out the left one. (Why the hardware is constructed that way is beyond me.)
This seems to be most common on Acer Aspire laptops, but I’ve seen them on other laptops as well, and fixing these are more of a long term project as they are non-trivial kernel patches. So far I’ve created a patch for Thinkpad U300s. Anyway, I would like to track the remaining ones in bug 1002978, so please add your system there according to the instructions.

Last but not least – thanks in advance for helping Ubuntu, as well as the greater Linux ecosystem (I’ll make sure that the patches pushed into Ubuntu gets upstream as well)!

Ok, for those of you who just want it up and working, I’m including a quickstart section before we dive into the details:

Quickstart

1) If you have an ATI/AMD or NVidia card, you need proprietary drivers.
2) You need to activate your secondary screen. For Intel, this is done in the regular “Screens” dialog, and on NVidia this is done in the nvidia-settings dialog. (I haven’t tested fglrx.)
3) You need to select the HDMI/DisplayPort output in the sound settings dialog, which is quickest reachable from the sound indicator.

Can’t we switch audio output automatically?

Choosing whether to automatically switch to HDMI/DisplayPort – essentially, switching sound to use the HDMI/DisplayPort whenever that screen is activated – is not trivial. It is not obvious to me whether the user wants to do that, or not. And in fact, in Ubuntu 11.10, we did switch, but only for some cards. And we did not switch back when the screen was deactivated. After a discussion where different opinions were voiced, I reached the conclusion that given the current pieces of infrastructure in place, the best option would be to disable automatic HDMI/DisplayPort switching for Ubuntu 12.04.

The problem of four devices

As mentioned in an earlier post, much HDMI/DisplayPort hardware have phantom outputs, and there is no way we know what outputs are real until something is plugged in. With the new sound settings UI in Ubuntu 12.04, we finally have a good user experience in this scenario: Only the outputs that are actually plugged in and possible to activate will be shown.

Sound settings in Ubuntu 12.04

Video drivers

Most of the code to activate HDMI/DisplayPort audio is in the video driver, rather than the audio driver. Therefore, if this is not working, it is more likely that the problem is within the video driver.
It is also notable that the open source driver for ATI/AMD (called radeon), has experimental support for HDMI/DisplayPort audio, at least for some cards. It is disabled by default, but you can activate it by adding radeon.audio=1 as a kernel boot parameter.

Upstreaming notes

PulseAudio 2.0 is soon to be released (hopefully). PulseAudio 2.0 and Ubuntu 12.04 have the same feature set when it comes to HDMI/DisplayPort audio support.
The new sound settings UI in Ubuntu 12.04 has not yet been upstreamed.

As a part of the Ubuntu Hardware Summit, I held a presentation on the topic “audio debugging techniques”, focused on HDA Intel cards. I also wrote down some notes for some of those slides. I share the slides and the notes with the hope that you will find the information useful if you run into troubles with your audio hardware.

Audio stack overview

The audio stack can seem a bit complex, but first look at the line all the way from the applications to the hardware. This is the optimal audio path. If the audio path is different, complexity will increase and you might run into undesired behaviour, such as one application blocking another from playing audio. There are valid exceptions though – we have a separate sound server for professional, low-latency audio. But that’s outside the scope of this presentation.

Let’s start from the top. On the top we have different kinds of audio applications, which talk to PulseAudio. GStreamer is a library to help media playback, it can for example decode ogg and mp3 files. PulseAudio mixes these audio streams and send them down to the kernel. The ALSA library and the ALSA kernel core do not do much here but send the audio pointers through. The HDA controller driver is responsible for talking directly to the hardware, and so it sets up all necessary DMA streams between the HDA controller and memory. The HDA controller driver also talks to the HDA codec driver, which is different for every codec vendor.

As some of you probably know, between the HDA controller – which is a part of the southbridge in most computers – and the HDA codec, a special HDA bus is used. This means that the only way we can talk to the codec is through the controller.

Controlling audio volume goes the same path. When you use your volume control application, it controls PulseAudio’s volume. PulseAudio in turn modifies the volume controls being exposed by the kernel, and the kernel in turn talks to the hardware to set volume control registers on the codec. There are two levels of abstraction here: first, the kernel might choose not to expose all of the hardware’s volume controls, and second, PulseAudio exposes only one big volume control which is the sum of some of the volume controls the kernel exposes. So there is filtering on two levels.

Audio stack overview – codec

Let us have a look at the HDA codec chip and how its internals are represented to the driver. The codec is constructed as a graph, and on this slide one of the more simple HDA codec graphs is shown (just because it would fit the screen). A while ago upstream made a small program to extract this graph from the codec and make a picture of it. Thanks to Keng-Yü, who works for Canonical in Taipei, this tool is available as a package in Ubuntu 11.10. Just install the “codecgraph” package.

In this graph we have nodes correspondings to DACs, ADCs, mixers, and pins. In this example we can see what pins are connected to which DACs by following the solid line. The dotted line shows a connection that is possible but not currently active.

As the Linux codec driver code grows more intelligent, we depend more and more on this information to be accurate. This way we do not hard code as much in the driver, so we can adapt to future codecs without having to rewrite much code.
The information coming from the codec is usually correct. One problem we have from time to time is though, is that sometimes chip vendors add features which they choose not to document in this graph (and not in any other way either). There is a mechanism called “processing coefficients” in the specification, where the vendor can add its own functionality without telling anyone. When that happens, and it is required to use these undocumented “processing coefficients” to enable all inputs and outputs, we usually run into difficult problems that require vendor support to resolve.

Also, in some cases the graph cannot describe the functionality needed, e g if some hardware is depending on special pins on the codec. We need to know about this when it happens, so we can support it in the driver. So if you are a hardware designer, my message is: Try to use the standard way of doing things as much as possible. Do this and it will work out of the box on Linux, and likely other operating systems as well. If you do anything special, you’re causing headache for driver writers, possibly causing a slower time to market.
An example of this would be how you control external amplifiers: you can use the EAPD pins, which is the standard way, and you can use GPIO pins, ACPI, or anything else, that will be more problematic and require special driver support.

Pin configuration default

We also depend on information from the writers of BIOS/UEFI, i e the computer’s firmware. As a hardware designer, you have the freedom to choose which pins of the codec that go to what physical jack. You might decide that you want a digital out, or you decide that this machine should not have that functionality, and then you leave that pin unconnected.
Then the firmware engineer needs to know this, and program this into the codec when the computer boots. This is done by setting the “Pin Configuration Default” register. This register tells us not only the device type (headphone, mic, etc), but also the location (Internal, External, Docking Station), the color, and the channel mapping (to use for surround functionality).

Several years ago, we did not read this register much, but these days, we depend on that for all new computers for setting up the codec correctly. So what do we do if this register is wrong? Well, if we work with hardware pre-release, there might be a chance we can feed this information back to the firmware writers so they can correct the problem. If the hardware is already released, we have to create a “quirk”. This means that the driver overrides the firmware’s pin value(s) and instead uses its own value.

Because this value is so important, I’ve written an application where you can try out different combinations of this register.

Mixer problems

One of the most common problems with getting audio up and running on Linux is to make sure the mixer is correct. Typical symptoms of this would be that some outputs are working where others are not, or that there is something wrong with the volume control.

Here are some initial checks of these problems. We do this at the two levels of mixer abstraction. First, let’s have a look at the PulseAudio volume control. You can do that in Gnome’s volume control application.

Also, PulseAudio controls the volume of mixers at the ALSA level. You can see how this works by starting the alsamixer program. In this program, you can also see additional sliders, which you can also use to verify that they are in the correct to enable sound. You start alsamixer from a terminal (in Ubuntu the quickest way to launch a terminal is the Ctrl-Alt-T shortcut).

Mixer control names

So let’s look at these two abstraction levels in more detail and how you can inspect what is actually going on. First, let’s look at the codec level. If you are familiar with the codec’s nodes and how they are connected, e g by running “codecgraph”, you can also find out which ALSA level controls that are connected to which nodes on the codec. This is done by inspecting the “codec proc” file. Every codec in the system has this file, and its name is made up of the sound card name, and the codec’s address on the HDA bus. In this file, you can also see a lot of other information about the codec.

So next, we will also take a look at PulseAudio’s abstraction of these controls. This is done by looking at the files in /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer. In this case, if we look at /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-output-headphones.conf, you can e g find the sections [Element Master] and [Element Headphones]. That means that the ALSA-level controls “Master” and “Headphones” are being merged in PulseAudio’s volume control when the “Headphones” port has been selected.

So these two places are the keys to understanding what is going on when you have mixer problems.

PCM/Streaming problems

So up next is when you have problems with the streaming. That is usually shown as the audio is breaking up, crackling or glitching. Unfortunately these problems are typically quite hard to resolve.

Sometimes this can be a bug in PulseAudio, or in the driver. But more often the problem is on either the application side or the hardware side.

If an application is not submitting data to PulseAudio in time, the PulseAudio has no audio to play back, so therefore playback breaks up. Once some more data has reached PulseAudio, it starts playback again, and so playback is started and stopped repeatedly.

The other problem could be with bad position reports from the hardware. PulseAudio depends on being able to ask the hardware for its current position at all times, and this should be sample accurate. You can test this by trying to run PulseAudio with timer scheduling disabled, in this case PulseAudio will rely more on DMA interrupts and less on position reports. However, this will also make PulseAudio draw more power than necessary from the machine, so please avoid this if you can.

When I try to debug these problems I usually start with making a PulseAudio verbose log. It often takes some knowledge and experience to be able to analyze this log though.

Jack sensing

Over the last six months or so, one of the things I’ve been working with is trying to get better jack detection handling, throughout the audio stack.
“Jack sensing” in this context means what to do when something has been plugged in, or unplugged.

When this happens, an interrupt (IRQ) is triggered and control is passed to the HDA codec driver. The driver takes the first action itself. Now, this is an area, unfortunately, when things differ a lot between different drivers, mostly between different vendors, but also between different chips of the same vendor, or even between configurations of the same chip.

But as a general rule, and for the most common vendors – that means Realtek, IDT and Conexant – these rules are the ones that are followed:

• For headphones – when you plug them in, the Internal Speakers are muted. Remember, this is still all at the kernel level.
• For what we’re doing with Line Outs – it’s not completely standardised everywhere yet, but it seems upstream is leaning on having Headphones mute Line Outs and having Line Outs mute Internal Speakers by default. Some drivers also have a special control where the automute behaviour can be changed.
• For Microphones – the only rule here is that if we have only one internal microphone and one external microphone, the external microphone takes over when you plug it in, and the internal microphone regains control when you unplug. Should there be any other inputs, e g two external mic jacks, or a line in jack, no autoswitching is done at the kernel level.

After this has been done, a signal is sent to userspace. Hopefully – this also varies between vendors. We’ll get back to that. What’s new in Ubuntu 11.10, is that this signal is being picked up by PulseAudio. This is important, because it enables PulseAudio, to switch port for volume control. So this means, when you press your media keys (or use the sound menu) to control your volume, you control your headphone’s volume when you have headphones plugged in, and your speakers’ volume when your headphones are unplugged.

So this not working properly, is one of the more common problems. I have written a small tool that helps you to debug whether this issue is in hardware or software. This tool is called “hda-jack-sense-test”. This program sends the “get pin sense” command to each codec and outputs the results. I actually had use for it earlier this week, and confirmed that it was a hardware issue: although the headphones were unplugged, the “get pin sense” command returned that the headphones were being plugged in and unplugged all the time.

If you can confirm that things are working at this level, you can also look in “Sound settings” to see if the port (this is known as a “connector”) is automatically switched whenever headphones – or microphone – is plugged in. If it is not, the most common cause is that kernel driver does not notify userspace correctly about that change.

HDMI/DisplayPort Audio