Comment 170 for bug 445849

I shut the machine down yesterday night. So I turned it on today to do your tests. Everything was as usual: can't play anything and PA was still in 5.1 mode. So I tried it in stereo mode. As expected, sound was okay. Then I switched it back to 5.1 and... you're not gonna believe it: it worked! What the...

Anyways, after that, I did the following in a terminal:

cinema@cinema-desktop:~$ gedit .pulse/client.conf <-- add autospawn=no
cinema@cinema-desktop:~$ killall pulseaudio
cinema@cinema-desktop:~$ pulseaudio &
[1] 1976
cinema@cinema-desktop:~$ E: main.c: ANDY_FIX: buggy SIMD optimizations disabled.
E: alsa-sink.c: ALSA woke us up to write new data to the device, but there was actually nothing to write!
E: alsa-sink.c: Most likely this is a bug in the ALSA driver 'snd_emu10k1'. Please report this issue to the ALSA developers.
E: alsa-sink.c: We were woken up with POLLOUT set -- however a subsequent snd_pcm_avail() returned 0 or another value < min_avail.

And sound still plays fine in 5.1. I can switch between 5.1 and stereo and everything stays fine! I figured I needed to reboot the machine once your patch is applied...

As of this writing, I'm about to clean reinstall and try the patch again plus a reboot.

[later that day...]

Okay so I did the following on first boot on [yet] another clean install:

remove all entries in sources.list
add your repository to my sources
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude upgrade

all went fine. Now I'm doing a reboot.

[seconds later...]

Now, I switch to 5.1 surround in PA and..... Sound works!!!!

Alright so now we're sure that all that was needed was a reboot... I'll put back the removed entries in sources.list, do some updates and install some software and see how it goes.

[later again]

Yep, everything is working fine. Seems like I FINALLY have acceptable 5.1 sound. Except that volume control for each channel is ACKWARD! I'll just leave it to default and adjust sound manually using my external amps.

I can finally watch a 5.1 movie... It's been like 6 months since I bought this computer and never had a chance to use it for what I bought it for :) I just watched Cars. Ah, it's so great to have good sound!

I haven't been able to try the submitted .debdiff... I'm sorry I don't know how to use this. Although I must admit I didn't try to figure out how to, and my sound is okay now.

I hope your patch gets officially implemented and/or the SIMD optimizations code gets better soon. And by soon, I mean sooner than two ubuntu releases... *wink wink*

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so to put it back in four easy steps!

In a terminal do the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xt-knight/ppa
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude upgrade

then reboot the computer. very important.

when back in gnome, go to Sound configuration and set 5.1 surround mode.

And that's it! 5.1 without high pitched crackling!