UPDATE: I’ll leave this around for posterity but a large part of this problem has now been fixed in the latest Raspberry Pi firmware. See here for instructions for raspbmc until that gets updated.
I’ve been in the process of setting up a Raspberry Pi in my office so I can play my mp3 collection through my old stereo. It’s generally gone well and I have to take my hat off to the developers of Raspbmc which makes setting up XBMC on the Pi ridiculously easy and fast. It didn’t take me long to have Airplay set up and running as well as being able to use my phone to remote control XBMC to play things direct from my music library sitting on my Synology NAS. Quite a nice setup really.
Just one problem. I play the music out through the Pi’s audio jack which doesn’t have a fantastic DAC. The big noticeable issue is audible pops every-time XBMC starts and stops playing. For Airplay this isn’t too bad, you get a pop when it first starts but only another after you stop playing. Playing direct on XBMC though you get two pops between each track as it stops playing one and starts the next. Very annoying. It’s a pretty well known problem and the best solution so far is to simply never stop playing. If you have a player that uses pulseaudio then you can configure it to keep the audio stream going even when idle. Of course it isn’t that easy, XBMC doesn’t use pulseaudio on the Pi. There is some work going on that might change that but for now it is very buggy to the point of being unusable. It seemed I was stuck … or was I?
It took some experimentation but I finally came across something of a hack that solves the problem for me. It probably works on other distributions but I did all this using Raspbmc.
First as root you want to do this:
echo "snd-bcm2835" >>/etc/modules
This makes the kernel module for the sound devices load on startup. It allows alsa and by proxy pulseaudio to talk to the audio hardware. Next edit /etc/pulse/system.pa and comment out this line:
load-module module-suspend-on-idle
This tells pulseaudio to keep the audio stream alive even when not playing anything. Now reboot your Pi. Once it is started up copy a plain wav file (nothing mp3 encoded or anything) to the Pi, log in and play it through pulseaudio:
paplay test.wav
If it doesn’t come out of the speakers then alsa might be trying to play to the HDMI port. Try running this then running the above command again:
sudo amixer cset numid=3 1
What just happened is pulseaudio played the sound file, but now should have kept the audio hardware active and will continue to do so until the Pi is next turned off. You might think that that might mean that XBMC can’t play anything now. You’d be wrong, it plays just fine and no longer suffers from the popping between tracks. Occasionally I hear a pop when I first start playing after startup, but after that I’ve not heard any issues.
There are probably easier ways to initialise pulseaudio but I don’t mind playing some sound on every startup to let me know my Pi is ready. I made it automatic by sticking this at the top of .bashrc for the pi user (which is used to run xbmc):
/usr/bin/paplay $HOME/test.wav
It means it also plays every-time I log in with ssh but I’m not expecting to do that much now it’s all working. I’m sure someone will point out the better way to do this that I’m too lazy to look for now everything is working for me.