Raspberry pi 4 poor audio, stuttering potential fix

[nexus]

I thought I'd share my personal experience of getting the raspberry pi 4 audio fixed. I'm actually surprised that more people haven't experienced this yet, or, everyone knows the fix already (entirely possible :) )

Anyway, I did a fresh install of raspbian buster, did an apt get update/upgrade/dist-upgrade.

Did a quick test on YouTube and noticed that audio was stuttering, sounded quite poor. Ran steamlink and all the audio was pure garbage. It really didn't sound good at all.

I did a lot of searching, and all suggestions didn't seem to fix the issue.

One suggestion was as follows:

sudo nano /etc/pulse/default.pa
Find the line that has the following:
Load-module module-udev-detect

Modify it to:
load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

Ctrl + O to save
A quick reboot and this fixed the issue (for me at least).

Is this a common issue?

[Dschingis Jahn]

Thank you so much for that post of yours. I was having problems with sound on steam link. All I got was some distorted noise in every game I tried. After reading your post and applying your solution, I now get actual sound in every game. Thanks a lot!

[mot]

had to login just to comment on this. youre a LIFESAVER! been trying to fix this since noon, did the trick immediately. big thank you!

[naimen]

Thank you very much, this fix works

[Peppa Pig]

Are these settings for pulseaudio? Because I think pulseaudio is not needed anymore.
My main thing is that video stutters so much.
I am using the pi 4 for emulation and movies just fine, waiting for the pi 4 steamlink app to get better. When compared to the steam link hardware, the pi4 stutters too much for me.

[Gerhard]

Thanks a lot for your post and for the fix! Suddenly after OS reinstallation and updates i also experienced this issue. Originally it wasn't there, guess something changed through software updates.

[GARM]

Damn, son! I was struggling for HOURS trying to get rid of those audio issues.
I somehow managed to set the pulseaudio to multichannel and audio became normal, but after reboot it went back to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Thanks for sharing the solution, it worked liked magic <3

Linux 4.19.75-v7l+

[robatron]

It worked! Thank you!!

[Zerbirus]

Thank you, worked for chromium when I had to reinstall raspbian. Was driving me mad.

That's one problem fixed, just need to figure out why youtube isn't playing audio in Firefox (fine on other video/audio streaming sites and chromium now) (no the tabs aren't muted)

[Solarin]

Yes! Can confirm this one setting plus reboot immediately solved my audio stuttering problems also in Chromium e.g. youtube. Seems the Pi4 needs to have system-timer audio scheduling off (0) and favors (older) interrupt-driven based scheduling.

[Vegz78]

Thank you very much, nexus!!! I've been struggling for hours with choppy sound in rdesktop on my new RPi4 installation, and this worked! It may have solved choppy YouTube video playback in Chromium as well.

[StupidDuck]

tsched=0, worked for me, thanks !

[Ed R]

This is the best thing I read all day (month?)

Struggling with stuttering sound under Retroarch on my Raspberry Pi 3 since at least June 2019. This post fixed it. I searched for a solution for months, no luck. Today came across this post completely by accident, so much by accident I don't even remember what I was clicking on.

This is something I guaranteed would need 10.5 lifetimes to figure out myself, maybe, and even then it's highly questionable that I would.

Thanks!

[fanoush]

Thanks a lot, adding tsched=0 fixed it. However the initial instructions did not work in current version. It was not about replacing "Load-module module-dev-detect" with udev variant but there already is udev variant few lines above so it was only about adding tsched=0 there. Anyway, working great now, thanks again.

[xandrex87]

I can confirm this also did the trick for me (only the tsched=0 part like fanoush). Although I have to admit I upgraded from rasbian jessie straight to buster without a clean install just last week, so there might have been some issues with the change of audio drivers.
In any case it now works flawlessly over my Cat6 network at home streaming Final Fantasy XIII from my work laptop with silly integrated graphics straight to my RPi 3 with an old PS3 controller connected to the RPi3 directy.
Next mission is to connect my bluetooth headset which does not seem to go flawlessly.
Thanks for the help

[HOD]

Thank you SO MUCH for this. It's been bugging me for quite some time!