Kubuntu - intermittent audio loss browser

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
1

I recently installed Kubuntu, in many ways I like it (whether it is the desktop or Ubuntu) and in many ways I prefer it over Windows7 but I’ve got one bug which prevents me from using the system daily as main OS. Whenever I play something with sound in the browser (Youtube) then I frequently loose sound for a very short duration. Always! I loose sound around 5-10 times a minute and each time around 0.25 second or less.

Facts.

  • The driver for my sound device (USB Soundblaster) works fine. Whenever I play music in a standalone music-player (like VLC) or a game in Steam I mostly don’t notice this problem. Maybe sometimes when the CPU-load gets higher.

  • The internet connection is more than good enough: VDSL with an average ping of 9 ms , downloadspeed of 48 Mbps and uploadspeed of 7 Mbps.

  • This happens with multiple browsers: Firefox/Waterfox and Chromium.

Whatever causes the problem, it seems to be related to some interaction between the browser and whatever software is responsible for the audio. I don’t know exactly how the audio works in Ubuntu, as far as I understand Alsa is responsible for the audio and PulseAudio is some kind of interface on top of that in between the application and Alsa. I could use another distro but then I don’t learn anything. How do I figure out the cause of the problem? I read that some people had problems with no sound in Firefox in Ubuntu, for them it had to do with the permission level but if that would be the problem then you wouldn’t have any sound at all, right? My hardware is a bit dated (RAM-crisis ;)) but not that bad: i5-750 (2,7 GHz. with boost to 3.3 GHz.) and a HD 7850. I have no clue how to solve this, other then that it seems to make sense to me to track processes while I play sound in the browser but I have zero knowledge of the programs/commands which I could use for that. I am not as new to Linux as the average person who first installs Mint but I also am far from an advanced user. Thanks to anyone who is willing to help.

2

So this only happens with the internet streaming service Youtube? Have you tried other sites like Youtube? Maybe it could be an HTML5 issue.

3

This happens on Youtube but it should be using HTML5 for most videos these days. I didn’t install Flash and I prefer to keep Flash of my system. I guess it is possible that HTML5 still causes problems, In Fedora26 (which I tried out before) I couldn’t even play some of the videos (HTML5?), at least not without those RPMFusion packages.

4

Apparently it is not a general browser problem. Maybe it was the video.


I played it to test the sound and part 2 - for both videos in the beginning already but also later in the video- also gave problems but I didn’t notice it while playing it in Windows 7. With other videos it is fine. Hopefully the video itself is the problem and I was a bit too paranoid because I had a lot of problems with sound in Linux, especially Linux Mint. With other videos which I try out there is no problem.