[SOLVED] Audio dropouts with USB sound card

Hi! Recently I bought an external USB sound card (Music Fidelity V-DAC). If I plug in the USB cable the sound device is recognized by Phonon in KDE4 (kdemod).
If I play an audio file in Amarok (or VLC) the audio is indeed redirected to the USB sound card and played correctly. However, if I use my USB mouse, or USB keyboard dropouts are occurring in the audio signal. It seems that other USB devices are interfering with my USB sound card.
More details:
Arch Linux with kernel 2.6.33 and kdemod 4. Phonon backend is Xine. I also tried gstreamer, but this crashes Amarok/
$ cat /proc/asound/cards
0 [Intel ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel
HDA Intel at 0xfebfc000 irq 29
1 [default ]: USB-Audio - USB Audio DAC
Burr-Brown from TI USB Audio DAC at usb-0000:00:1d.1-1, full s
$ dmesg | grep Audio
input: Burr-Brown from TI USB Audio DAC as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.1/usb3/3-1/3-1:1.2/input/input12
generic-usb 0003:08BB:2706.0003: input,hidraw2: USB HID v1.00 Device [Burr-Brown from TI USB Audio DAC ] on usb-0000:00:1d.1-1/input2
input: Burr-Brown from TI USB Audio DAC as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.1/usb3/3-1/3-1:1.2/input/input15
generic-usb 0003:08BB:2706.0005: input,hidraw2: USB HID v1.00 Device [Burr-Brown from TI USB Audio DAC ] on usb-0000:00:1d.1-1/input2
I also tried an Ubuntu (9.10) live CD. Using ALSA or Pulseaudio a clean audio signal without dropouts is produced.
I wonder if someone can help me with this problem, or point me to more information. Thanks!
Last edited by boomerang (2010-04-25 17:47:15)

Thanks for your suggestion. I added the following line to my /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf file:
options snd-usb-audio enable_msi=1
After a reboot the problem still persists. I also tried another suggestion from this forum:
options snd-usb-audio nrpacks=1
This doesn't work either. I tried to change settings in /etc/security/limits.conf, which looks like this:
@audio - rtprio 99
@audio - nice -10
@audio - memlock 250000
The USB sound card doesn't share a IRQ with another USB devices, as can be seen here:
$cat /proc/interrupts
CPU0 CPU1
0: 124157 0 IO-APIC-edge timer
1: 2102 0 IO-APIC-edge i8042
8: 182 0 IO-APIC-edge rtc0
9: 523 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi acpi
12: 3780 0 IO-APIC-edge i8042
14: 15944 0 IO-APIC-edge ata_piix
15: 5177 0 IO-APIC-edge ata_piix
16: 29001 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi uhci_hcd:usb5, firewire_ohci, nvidia
17: 0 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi mmc0
18: 0 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi uhci_hcd:usb4
19: 44788 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi uhci_hcd:usb3
23: 387 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi ehci_hcd:usb1, uhci_hcd:usb2
28: 1608 0 PCI-MSI-edge eth0
29: 932 0 PCI-MSI-edge hda_intel
30: 0 0 PCI-MSI-edge iwl3945
NMI: 0 0 Non-maskable interrupts
LOC: 22401 65060 Local timer interrupts
SPU: 0 0 Spurious interrupts
PMI: 0 0 Performance monitoring interrupts
PND: 0 0 Performance pending work
RES: 89856 104215 Rescheduling interrupts
CAL: 1409 563 Function call interrupts
TLB: 1733 2536 TLB shootdowns
TRM: 0 0 Thermal event interrupts
THR: 0 0 Threshold APIC interrupts
MCE: 0 0 Machine check exceptions
MCP: 2 2 Machine check polls
ERR: 0
MIS: 0
$ lsusb
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 046d:c03d Logitech, Inc. M-BT96a Pilot Optical Mouse
[b]Bus 003 Device 003: ID 08bb:2706 Texas Instruments Japan [/b]
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 07ab:fc88 Freecom Technologies
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 05e1:0501 Syntek Semiconductor Co., Ltd DC-1125 Webcam
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 046d:c317 Logitech, Inc. Wave Corded Keyboard
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Any other suggestions?
I even tried to disable the internal sound card by blacklisting it:
blacklist snd-hda-intel
.. but still no success
Last edited by boomerang (2010-04-19 20:04:33)

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