Dear Linuxmusicians community,
I am almost desperate. Maybe (hopefully) you can help me?
I have various USB 2.0 audio interfaces (MOTU, Focusrite) connected to my five-year-old HP ZBook Studio G5 laptop via an i-tec 5K Thunderbolt docking station.
The laptop is running manjaro GNOME with Linux Kernel 6.6 and I'm using Jack2 with 48000 sample rate, buffer size 256 and 3 periods/buffer with PulseAudio Plugin Bridge enabled.
I have activated a few tweaks according to the following instructions: https://blog.inagaki.in/en/post/manjaro ... vironment/ and this works very well.
Now I have set up my new HP ZBook Studio G10 laptop with the same distro, kernel, configuration and tweaks applied. But I can't even play a YT video without huge digital crackles in the audio output.
I then used rtirq to drastically increase the priority of the xHCI interrupt and that seemed to solve the problem for a moment.
Until after about an hour of audio streaming the digital crackling started again and didn't stop. Stopping the stream and running jack_control stop/start helps for a while until the digital crackling comes back again.
By the way, no Xruns are reported in qjackctl or cadence, as long as sample rate is not below 32. The sample rate therefore appears to have no influence on the occurrence of the digital clicks. And connecting the audio interface directly to the laptop (i.e. not via the TB Dock), or to any other USB port on the Dock, does not change anything. I also tried kernel 6.1 with same results.
It also makes no difference whether the audio stream runs through the MOTU 828es (with Drumfix driver: options motu samplerate=48000 midi=1 vendor=0) or the Scarlett 18i20 (with USB kernel driver: options snd_usb_audio vid=0x1235 pid=0x8201 device_setup=1). It always starts to crackle sooner or later.
The rtcqs script shows all tests as OK - on both laptops.
I am completely lost here. Do any of you have any ideas on what else I could try, configure or tune to achieve a smooth audio stream?
Any help is highly appreciated!