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After installing Ubuntu 20.04 on my desktop computer (Realtek onboard sound card, codec ALC887), I am experiencing a very annoying click (popping sound) every time I open any content with audio.

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5 Answers 5

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It was happening because Ubuntu turned on the sound card power-saving capabilities. Turning it off can be the only way to get rid of the annoying sound:

  1. Verify how is your sound card's power_save parameter:

    cat /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save

  2. If it returns 1, do the following to change it temporally:

    echo "0" | sudo tee /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save

  3. If the previous step worked for you, persist that configuration (otherwise the problem will continue after reboot):

    echo "options snd_hda_intel power_save=0" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/audio_disable_powersave.conf

  4. (Optional) You can also do the same for power_save_controller parameter following the steps 1, 2 and 3 replacing power_save by power_save_controller also changing 0 to N.

    Note: using the first step will probably return Y for this parameter, instead of 1.

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  • 8
    Power saving is a Linux kernel feature and it is good to have. It is just some unknown reason why you get this annoying noise as soon as the audio card wakes up from powersaving. The above is a workaround. The proper solution is probably to get PulseAudio to deal with this gracefully.
    – user4124
    Apr 25, 2020 at 12:44
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    @user4124 Indeed this is unfortunately a workaround, but it may be better than this disruptance. I surely will also upvote any answer that comes with a fundamental solution to the issue.
    – vanadium
    Apr 25, 2020 at 14:02
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    @user4124 it's cheap hardware. Speaker amplifiers put a transient on the output when you apply power to them, unless someone who actually knows what they're doing does the integration properly.
    – hobbs
    Apr 26, 2020 at 2:13
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    @user4124 How do you propose PulseAudio should "deal with this gracefully"?
    – marcelm
    Apr 26, 2020 at 9:24
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    @hobbs, indeed it's a cheap hardware. This is the reason that I thought it could be useful to mention it and I had to manage something to make it a little better. Proprietary driver seems to solve it somehow on Windows 10, but on Ubuntu, I believe it won't be enough to use PulseAudio to solve it... I would be glad if some one could show it working...
    – Rodrigo Viana Rocha
    Apr 26, 2020 at 15:58
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For those here in 2022 that have just upgraded to Kernel version 5.13.0-37. (Use uname -a to check your kernel version.)

There appears to be a bug in this version causing audio crackling sounds for external audio interfaces but there is a workaround.

Change Pulse Audio's default sample rate to 48000.

sudo nano /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

Find the lines starting with

; default-sample-rate
; alternate-sample-rate

Remove the ; and change the values to 48000 so it looks like this:

default-sample-rate = 48000
alternate-sample-rate = 48000

Save the file, then restart pulse audio with pulseaudio -k

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    On kernel 5.13. This solved my problem. I just want to point out that one of the symptoms mentioned in the bug report is that you get regular pulses / clicks every 7 ish seconds. Hopefully this comment helps somebody find this via Google.
    – Cedar
    Mar 28, 2022 at 12:29
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    Awesome, this saved my ears
    – Ben
    Apr 1, 2022 at 8:04
  • Thank you very much, it works perfectly. I'm on Ubuntu 21.10 with kernel 5.13.0-37 too.
    – thiagobraga
    Apr 2, 2022 at 0:31
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    also affected on 5.13.0-39 with m-audio dual external usb interface, the click for me was like 2-3 times per second, silent at first but playing any kind of sound in browser or other apps and it became very loud. solution above worked brilliant.
    – DarkMukke
    Apr 2, 2022 at 21:07
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    This may be a good answer and it seems to help a lot of people, but it's doesn't actually answer the question, which was about a single (!) pop when starting to play audio.
    – rob74
    Sep 6, 2022 at 13:30
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You can suspend power saving via PulseAudio instead of via the sound card and comment out the following line in /etc/pulse/default.pa to look like this:

### Automatically suspend sinks/sources that become idle for too long
#load-module module-suspend-on-idle

Then restart PulseAudio:

systemctl restart --user pulseaudio

If that doesn't work then just kill it and it will restart:

pulseaudio --kill
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    The most upvoted answer did not work for me on Arch Linux. However, your answer did work for me and is also documented in wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management#PulseAudio
    – Elijah Lynn
    Jun 23, 2021 at 14:54
  • Also for me the most upvoted answer did not work, but this solution worked on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on a not-yet-fully-supported Thinkpad P14s 2nd Gen.
    – Michael
    Dec 23, 2021 at 8:50
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For anyone using Pop!_OS with Ubuntu 22.04 or higher, the audio software is now pipewire, and no longer pulseaudio. So @user1115995's solution of disabling the suspend feature on pulseaudio, can be done for pipewire with these commands: (source)

sudo sed -i 's/--\["session.suspend-timeout-seconds"\] = 5/\["session.suspend-timeout-seconds"\] = 0/' /usr/share/wireplumber/main.lua.d/50-alsa-config.lua
systemctl restart --user pipewire.service
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  • note that sed -i overwrites the file rather than editing it; so this may effect file permissions
    – guest4308
    Feb 27 at 16:27
0

I've tried solutions above however they did not seem to help me. Or at least did not seem to help me alone. The extra step that I did was to enable auto mute in alsamixer.

Steps to do that:

  1. Type alsamixer to the terminal.

  2. Scroll all the way to the right by pressing RIGHT arrow key until you hit Auto-Mute Mode.

  3. Enable it by pressing UP arrow key then hit ESC.

Note that I have to do it again after restart. However I am sure there is a way how to preserve these alsamixer settings such that they survive rebooting.

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