Adobe Flash 9 Audio Ticks in Firefox Linux

Written: 1 september 2008

I had an annoying problem with flash under firefox: ticks during playback. The solution was to create an alsa soundrc file with the following content.

pcm.main {
type hw
card 0
}

ctl.main {
type hw
card 0
}

pcm.!default {
   type dmix       # dmix plugin for mixing the output
   ipc_key 1234    # a unique number
   slave {
         pcm "main"
         period_time 0
         period_size 8192
         buffer_size 32768
         rate 44100
         }
}

The above chunk oif text should be placed in /etc/asound.conf or in ~/.asoundrc, depending on whether you want this setup to be system wide or for you own account only.

There are a number of important points:
- this was also true for alsalib version 1.2.10
- the key is the period_size and buffer_size
- flash cannot be configured to use another audiodevice, so the default is important.
- don't forget competing drivers to the soundcard. That is: kill jackd, artsd and other blahd's