FS#43298 - [orc] Microphone recording level too high after the recent upgrade

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by Larry (lzlarryli) - Thursday, 01 January 2015, 16:13 GMT
Last edited by Jan de Groot (JGC) - Monday, 13 February 2017, 10:58 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category Packages: Extra
Status Closed
Assigned To Ionut Biru (wonder)
Jan Alexander Steffens (heftig)
Architecture x86_64
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 3
Private No

Details

Description:

After upgrading orc from orc-0.4.22-2-x86_64 to orc-0.4.23-1-x86_64, my
USB mic recording level becomes very high. I can consistently reproduce
this problem in the following way.

1. With orc-0.4.23-1, start pavucontrol and audacity. To get a
reasonable sounding recording, the mic volume has to be less than 5%.
Even then, the recording is very noisy and craking.
2. Downgrade to orc-0.4.22-2 and redo the above process. Clear
recordings can be made at 100% mic volume.

My USB mic is:
Bus 003 Device 003: ID 0556:0001
Asahi Kasei Microsystems Co., Ltd AK5370 I/F A/D Converter

This is not a problem restricted to this hardware. I learned the fix
from the Arch forum:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=191392&p=1
where other users with different hardware reported the similar
problem and subsequently figured out downgrading orc resolved the
issue.

It seems that the project website for orc is down. So I report the
bug here. Maybe the package maintainer knows more about the current
status of the project and where this problem should be reported.

This task depends upon

Closed by  Jan de Groot (JGC)
Monday, 13 February 2017, 10:58 GMT
Reason for closing:  Fixed
Additional comments about closing:  Fixed in pulseaudio. Upstream wants to fix orc also, but nothing has happened so far.
Comment by Gun Onen (gun26) - Friday, 02 January 2015, 13:58 GMT
I've got the same issue with a USB mic I have here. On my system it shows up as:
Bus 003 Device 007: ID 0c76:160a JMTek, LLC.
After the orc upgrade to 0.4.23 the mic level went through the roof and it became completely unuseable. I worked around it with the same downgrade as Larry after reading the same forum thread he references. I have another USB mic here, in the form of a Plantronics USB headset and that mic was unaffected by orc-0.4.23 and continued to work. So the problem only appears to affect some USB microphones, not all.
Comment by Alain Kalker (ackalker) - Saturday, 03 January 2015, 14:18 GMT
@lzlarryli

If by "project website" you mean [1], well, that site is working for me, but this company doesn't provide support for Orc anymore, instead focussing on products containing Gstreamer technology.

It appears that Orc is now under the umbrella of the Gstreamer project on freedesktop.org, and [2] states that bugs should be reported on that project's bugtracker[3], which appears to be up and running.

[1]: http://code.entropywave.com/orc/
[2]: "Where do I file bug reports?" http://code.entropywave.com/gstreamer-sdk-faq/
[3]: http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/bugs/
Comment by Alain Kalker (ackalker) - Saturday, 03 January 2015, 16:14 GMT
I can reproduce the problem by changing the volume on any stream. A simple example (requires installing the espeak package):

# pacman -S espeak
$ pulseaudio -k
$ # restart pulseaudio if it doesn't start automatically on first use
$ man man | espeak

In pavucontrol, change the volume slider for the espeak application stream ==> severely distorted sound.

I've successfully bisected the problem to the following first bad commit:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/orc/commit/?id=a62eefc1dc716046d99aacec208cfdfe42dadb34

This code is too involved for me to take down in one gulp, suspecting a breaking ABI change I rebuilt pulseaudio against most recent orc and reinstalled pulseaudio and libpulse, but to no avail, the problem persists.
Comment by Alain Kalker (ackalker) - Saturday, 03 January 2015, 16:19 GMT
Rebuilt alsa-plugins against latest libpulse: still no improvement.
Comment by Alain Kalker (ackalker) - Saturday, 03 January 2015, 17:27 GMT
Reported bug upstream: Bug 742271 – [bisected] Severely distorted sound on changing volume of stream : https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=742271
Comment by Larry (lzlarryli) - Saturday, 03 January 2015, 17:39 GMT
@Alain, Thanks for the reply. It seems that the project page is back online.
I confirm your observation that commit a62eefc1dc716046d99aacec208cfdfe42dadb34 is the culprit.

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