Linux has terrible sound quality

[Voylinslife]

I was using linux mint but I stopped using it because I couldn't get decent sound on it. I tried a lot of method's which I found online but my sound kept sounding tinny and slightly odd. Is there a linux distro that does sound good?

(I know this may be a terrible question because it's basically a driver problem or installing more programs, but for some reason, installing more programs never worked for me

[NelizMastr]

5 minutes ago, Voylinslife said:

(I know this may be a terrible question because it's basically a driver problem or installing more programs, but for some reason, installing more programs never worked for me

Could also be a problem with your specific sound chip having limited support for Linux. If it's not Realtek, it can get sketchy sometimes.

[Wild Penquin]

There should be nothing in Linux that makes it sound better or worse (than any other OS) per se, and even more so that would be distribution specific. There must have been something wrong with your setup.

 

What were you trying to play back? On what HW? What program, and to what sound (on the other OS) did you compare it to?

 

Chances are, if it is a laptop or something similar, that Windows - which has the proprietary drivers for your laptop - has a built-in software EQ which makes it sound better per default, or something fishy like that in play.

 

Sometimes Pulseaudio will resample everything to 48kHz per default - but this resampling will often happen on every other OS, too, if you are trying to play back different sampling rates at the same time, if your soundcard has only one DAC (which most cheap ones will have). More modern Pulseaudio releases (and / or distro settings) will default to whatever playback rate the first sound playing stream requests, so they can play back correctly 44.1kHz sources without resampling. However, hearing the resampling artifacts is quite subtle, even if Pulseaudio was configured to use the worst resampling algorithms available to it. So I doubt this is what hou are hearing (EDIT: Also, it should not sound "tinny", but intgroduce all kinds of harmonic distributions distortions, especially at higher frequencies).

[Voylinslife]

On 7/12/2018 at 7:05 PM, Wild Penquin said:

There should be nothing in Linux that makes it sound better or worse (than any other OS) per se, and even more so that would be distribution specific. There must have been something wrong with your setup.

 

What were you trying to play back? On what HW? What program, and to what sound (on the other OS) did you compare it to?

 

Chances are, if it is a laptop or something similar, that Windows - which has the proprietary drivers for your laptop - has a built-in software EQ which makes it sound better per default, or something fishy like that in play.

 

Sometimes Pulseaudio will resample everything to 48kHz per default - but this resampling will often happen on every other OS, too, if you are trying to play back different sampling rates at the same time, if your soundcard has only one DAC (which most cheap ones will have). More modern Pulseaudio releases (and / or distro settings) will default to whatever playback rate the first sound playing stream requests, so they can play back correctly 44.1kHz sources without resampling. However, hearing the resampling artifacts is quite subtle, even if Pulseaudio was configured to use the worst resampling algorithms available to it. So I doubt this is what hou are hearing (EDIT: Also, it should not sound "tinny", but intgroduce all kinds of harmonic distributions distortions, especially at higher frequencies).

Youtube video's, games and audio files in general.
My laptop with a realtek driven soundcard, 4 core 2.6 ghz cpu, 6 GB ram
to the sound on windows, on windows the sound was just way more clear in my opinion

[jde3]

I've used Linux as a DAW for a music studio with good results using Ardour and Jack. I can assure you there is noting wrong with Linux audio in general.. in fact you can do some pretty powerful things.

 

I think the key word here is "laptop". Laptops tend to make minor changes to hardware with tweaked drivers and fail to tell anyone. I have never seen a Linux laptop used in the pro sphere (pretty much only Mac's there)

[Willowwizard]

I have to agree with everyone here, it sounds like Windows has some special software installed that's 'enhancing' the audio as it plays, making it sound a bit better than the laptop would be able to produce otherwise.

You can try installing PulseAudio's equalizer module (or PulseEffects), but keep in mind that these types of software solutions generally will reduce the performance of the system a bit (as system resources will get allocated to audio processing).

[Linus_torvalds]

I had HP 4540s it had some kind of audio driver on windows not found in linux. It sounded worse on linux then on windows, also it worked 2 hours under linux on battery, on windows it worked 3.5 hours.

 

Now i have my beloved Lenovo t440s, everything works great under linux except SOUND it was wayyyy better on windows. Again it was some audio driver software that made sound great under windows.

 

P.S. I do not care about sound. Windows is not for me. Linux is and i am using it for some years now and i still learn interesting things about it everyday. It's biggest thing that happened in computer history.

[Voylinslife]

8 hours ago, mate_mate91 said:

I had HP 4540s it had some kind of audio driver on windows not found in linux. It sounded worse on linux then on windows, also it worked 2 hours under linux on battery, on windows it worked 3.5 hours.

 

Now i have my beloved Lenovo t440s, everything works great under linux except SOUND it was wayyyy better on windows. Again it was some audio driver software that made sound great under windows.

 

P.S. I do not care about sound. Windows is not for me. Linux is and i am using it for some years now and i still learn interesting things about it everyday. It's biggest thing that happened in computer history.

for me sound is important but also video editing. I couldn't get Davinci Resolve working in Linux so I stopped using it. Kdenlive just looked like a big mess (linux mint) and I couldn't sort it, I think it's cinnamons fault. I would like to go back to Linux but I will at least need a solution for my video editing hobby xs

[Linus_torvalds]

1 hour ago, Voylinslife said:

for me sound is important but also video editing. I couldn't get Davinci Resolve working in Linux so I stopped using it. Kdenlive just looked like a big mess (linux mint) and I couldn't sort it, I think it's cinnamons fault. I would like to go back to Linux but I will at least need a solution for my video editing hobby xs

You should try lightworks. The Wolf of Wall Street, LA Confidential, Pulp Fiction, Heat, Road to Perdition, Hugo, The King’s Speech and many more films were made using it.

[Wild Penquin]

9 hours ago, Voylinslife said:

for me sound is important but also video editing. I couldn't get Davinci Resolve working in Linux so I stopped using it. Kdenlive just looked like a big mess (linux mint) and I couldn't sort it, I think it's cinnamons fault. I would like to go back to Linux but I will at least need a solution for my video editing hobby xs

Video editing is one thing that is quite bad on Linux (I've been told, I don't edit videos). I've heard Blender can do a decent job (although it is a 3D modelling suite!).

 

I guess the thing boils down to the UI and other components developing costs; Video Editing needs a complex, well designed UI, and not having that much user base as for some more generic task in relation to the amount of effort needed for a decent UI, a good open source video editor is missing (not to mention that it's not just the UI, but that might be easier to understand as a development concept). Might be there never will be one, as I believe there are plenty of video editors (users, not programs) out there who are professional or semi-professional, and as such are willing to pay for their editors, but(often) are not the programmer-type who can or would like to do their own tools as a community (or, even if they were, they are too busy editing videos, and hence like to pay for their program suites instead of starting to develop their own tools). You might try some paid video editor on Linux, I've heard they work better, but I presume can be expensive pieces of software.

[Voylinslife]

I started using Manjaro from today and for some reason, the sound is so much better and I'm having less glitches with GUI being messed up by colors like KdenLive was unusual in linux mint because of theme colors that changed the layout to unreadable ^^"

[Voylinslife]

On 7/16/2018 at 9:23 AM, mate_mate91 said:

You should try lightworks. The Wolf of Wall Street, LA Confidential, Pulp Fiction, Heat, Road to Perdition, Hugo, The King’s Speech and many more films were made using it.

Lightworks is paid

 

On 7/16/2018 at 5:52 PM, Wild Penquin said:

Video editing is one thing that is quite bad on Linux (I've been told, I don't edit videos). I've heard Blender can do a decent job (although it is a 3D modelling suite!).

 

I guess the thing boils down to the UI and other components developing costs; Video Editing needs a complex, well designed UI, and not having that much user base as for some more generic task in relation to the amount of effort needed for a decent UI, a good open source video editor is missing (not to mention that it's not just the UI, but that might be easier to understand as a development concept). Might be there never will be one, as I believe there are plenty of video editors (users, not programs) out there who are professional or semi-professional, and as such are willing to pay for their editors, but(often) are not the programmer-type who can or would like to do their own tools as a community (or, even if they were, they are too busy editing videos, and hence like to pay for their program suites instead of starting to develop their own tools). You might try some paid video editor on Linux, I've heard they work better, but I presume can be expensive pieces of software.

I've tried Blender but I got disgusted by it ^^" I don't find it useful and hard to use, I normally use premiere pro and Davinci Resolve. Lightworks is paid but I find it a way too high price. I will try KdenLive now that I'm using Manjaro. Manjaro fixed my sound issue but now let's see how good KdenLive is

[Linus_torvalds]

1 hour ago, Voylinslife said:

Lightworks is paid

Yeah but free version can export in 720p

[Voylinslife]

14 hours ago, mate_mate91 said:

Yeah but free version can export in 720p

I need at least 1080p.

How is it to do video editing in a windows virtual machine on Linux?  I'm mostly using Davinci

[Aderm]

It might've been because you weren't using pulseaudio or alsa. I saw you said you were using manjaro now and I'm pretty sure that has pulseaudio built in.

Alsa sounds better though, try that out.