Sound issues on Le Potato running armbian (clicking, no sound)

Software
1

Hello, I’m trying to use my le potato to listen to radio transmissions using an SDR. I am having issues with audio, though. I am using the headphone jack, for context.

This could be an issue with the java software, sdr-trunk, but the behavior leads me to believe it may be hardware/driver/mixer related. Nevertheless, I am creating an issue there as well, in case it might be. When trying to setup the audio output in sdr-trunk, I see the following error in console:

Couldn't obtain audio source data line for audio output - mixer [LIBRETECHCC [plughw:0,0]]

When I test the audio it almost never works. Sometimes if I try to play the test tone, it will play through the device (this is very infrequent that I do hear anything at all), but if I try to play the tone again, or start decoding radio broadcasts, I do not hear any further audio. There does not appear to be an error thrown when playing a tone, only selecting an audio device. Sometimes changing the device to “default [default] - STEREO” will let a test tone be played again briefly. Again, this behavior is inconsistent.

As I attempt to switch the audio device, or play a test tone, an additional “ALSA plug-in [java] 100%” menu item is added to the “Playback Streams” menu in the sound menu. These go away after I close sdr-trunk.

The available audio devices to sdr trunk are: “default [default] - MONO, default [default] - STEREO, default [plughw:0,0] - STEREO, default [plughw:0,0] - MONO”

First, speaker-check works fine, and audio plays from the device. I do hear a clicking a few seconds after the speaker test runs, though. I also hear a quiet click on the initial startup of sdr-trunk, and then a louder click when the error message is printed when I try to select an audio device.

I notice the following error log in dmesg:

[  155.694596] hdmi-audio-codec hdmi-audio-codec.2.auto: Creating IEC958 channel status failed -22
[  155.697707] hdmi-audio-codec hdmi-audio-codec.2.auto: ASoC: error at snd_soc_dai_hw_params on i2s-hifi: -22
[  155.707391] gx-sound-card sound: ASoC: PRE_PMU: be.dai-link-2-playback event failed: -22

I do not know if this is related, though.

aplay -L:

null
    Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)
default
    Playback/recording through the PulseAudio sound server
samplerate
    Rate Converter Plugin Using Samplerate Library
speexrate
    Rate Converter Plugin Using Speex Resampler
jack
    JACK Audio Connection Kit
oss
    Open Sound System
pulse
    PulseAudio Sound Server
upmix
    Plugin for channel upmix (4,6,8)
vdownmix
    Plugin for channel downmix (stereo) with a simple spacialization
hw:CARD=LIBRETECHCC,DEV=0
    LIBRETECH-CC, 
    Direct hardware device without any conversions
plughw:CARD=LIBRETECHCC,DEV=0
    LIBRETECH-CC, 
    Hardware device with all software conversions
sysdefault:CARD=LIBRETECHCC
    LIBRETECH-CC, 
    Default Audio Device
dmix:CARD=LIBRETECHCC,DEV=0
    LIBRETECH-CC, 
    Direct sample mixing device
usbstream:CARD=LIBRETECHCC
    LIBRETECH-CC
    USB Stream Output

Does anyone have some suggestions to troubleshoot? Thanks

2

We don’t really support Armbian here since their kernels are different than ours. Best to use that forum for Armbian related questions. That said, we did document some basic audio gotchas.

3

Ah, okay! Did not realize it was unsupported since it was on the downloads page. What OS should I use then for best support, Ubuntu?

Thanks!

4

You should use our images as a control. If it works on our images and does not on Armbian, you should bring up the issue in Armbian forum so they can fix it.