Pipewire playback occasionally/frequently becomes choppy

• Apr 12, 2025 - 10:12

Sometimes -- usually not very often, but today it's every 30 seconds -- MuseScore (4.5.1) vs Pipewire starts playing only about 5-6 audio blocks per second.

Pipewire quantum is set to 44.1 kHz, 1024 samples per buffer. This is Ubuntu Studio, so it's already tuned for real-time audio.

So this happens, and I quit MuseScore, reopen it, and audio playback is fine... for one or two minutes. Then the problem starts again.

No other audio app is similarly affected -- they're all completely stable.

Are there any other tricks I should be aware of to get MuseScore out of this condition where it becomes unstable within a minute or two? (For the immediate need, I guess maybe I need to reboot -- but one of my reasons for preferring Linux is that it shouldn't be necessary to reboot just to "fix" things.)

hjh


Comments

(It improved after I quit one other app, without a reboot... so, sporadic problem. So maybe there's something about: if another app is chewing up more than a certain % of the duty cycle, MuseScore can go wonky more easily.)

hjh

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