Fixing audio delays in desktop Linux
I’ve been experiencing a weird issue lately with several of my Arch Linux desktop machines: a short delay when audio starts playing. It appears to persist across different desktop environments and sound outputs so I suspect there is a software issue somewhere.
The source still isn’t clear to me and I tried various solutions I’d looked around online for but they didn’t help. Eventually I found this post: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/362223/short-audio-playback-is-muted-requires-warming-up-or-secondary-audio-in-backgro
I hate that this is what it came to, but I can only hope it can get fixed upstream.
Install sox: sudo pacman -S sox
Paste this into the file ~/.config/systemd/user/continuous-silence.service:
[Unit]
Description=Continuous silence
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/play -qn
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
Run: systemctl --user enable --now continuous-silence
That should do it. A horrible workaround, but the sound delay was getting really annoying as it disrupts the flow of videos I watch and music I play.