I recently posted my steps for creating a VARA+direwolf Hybrid Packet Gateway, but one problem has been eluding me, and thus preventing me from sharing this information further:

Pulseaudio just sounds like trash sometimes

I believe it’s correlated with higher CPU load and buffer underruns. In fact, I do see buffer underrun errors on the direwolf console which confirm this suspicion.

So, I just need to increase the buffer… right?

As far as I can tell, the pulse daemon setting default-fragments is related to the buffer size; from the Arch wiki

default-fragments: Audio samples are split into multiple fragments of default-fragment-size-msec each. The larger the buffer is, the less likely audio will skip when the system is overloaded. On the downside this will increase the overall latency. Increase this value if you have issues.

default-fragment-size-msec: The size in milliseconds of each fragment. This is the amount of data that will be processed at once by the daemon.

The defaults for these values should be commented out in your /etc/pulse/daemon.conf, for me they are

• default-fragments = 4
• default-fragment-size-msec = 25

The value I’m currently experimenting with is default-fragments = 8, and it does seem to improve the situation, but doesn’t totally resolve the issue.

The other setting that I hear a lot about is passing load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0 in /etc/pulse/default.pa. This disables the timer scheduling in favor of the previous “interrupt-based” scheduling.

Once I get to the bottom of this, I’ll be updating the VARA hybrid gateway guide linked above.