1656988 - High-pitched crackling sound while playing audio

Status: NEW

(Core :: Audio/Video: Playback, defect, P3)

Description

[Adrian]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:81.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/81.0

Steps to reproduce:

Playing certain songs on open.spotify.com or watching live streams on twitch.tv.
A certain song on open.spotify.com can be used to easily reproduce the bug: https://open.spotify.com/album/4ywqwcXHknbizHO6MkJCQB - Song: Trojan Horse, timestamp: 0:40 - 0:50.

Actual results:

Playing audio on the two sites mentioned result in pronounced high-pitched crackling sounds at certain times. This is easily reproducible by replaying the media, the sound artifacts being always in the same place in time, while rewinding the song on open.spotify.com or watching the VoD of the twitch live stream.

I made an example video where I am playing the song and the audio artifacts can be heard: https://streamable.com/x7e918 (explanation: When the song starts you can notice a green box on screen, while the box is green the audio it's ok but when the box turns RED (really fast), those are the actually moments when you can hear the audio artifacts. (timestamp on the spotify song: 0:22, 0:23, 0:41, 0:44, 0:46-0:48))

Another video example where I play a snippet of the song where the audio bug is most pronounced at 0.70x speed so it can be heard better: https://streamable.com/nfmbx9 - The bottom track it's recorded on Chrome, and the top one on Firefox. After playing the audio clip two times for each browser (first Chrome, then Firefox), I zoomed in on the waveform and you can notice a distinct change between the two tracks in the right channel. The audio bug can be heard only on the right channel for me.

Expected results:

The audio artifacts should not be heard.

I tested on safe-mode, freshly installed Nightly, old builds of Firefox, tested on two different PCs with older Windows versions, I uninstall/reinstall/updated audio drivers, I switch between a lot of sample rate and bit depth combinations of my Speaker device.. no result.

My raw data: http://paste.mozilla.org/KxXn0vZt

Comment 1

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

I can reproduce this issue on my Windows 10 laptop [0]. I use MOZ_DUMP_AUDIO to dump the raw audio data [1], which was captured on "Trojan Horse" around 0'41. So it apparently the data which we filled into AudioStream already had the defect.

I also captured a profiled result [2] and check the log with MediaDecoder/AudioStream/MediaDemuxer/cubeb, but I didn't see anything suspicious.

In addition, this issue can't be reproduced on my macbook (10.14.6).

[0] https://pastebin.com/yjump15J
[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1l2dt_YCAfO1OOGDugi30ix3f9UIM7GuT/view
[2] https://share.firefox.dev/2PjQSWW

Comment 2

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

Hi, Adrian,
I wonder if this issue is a long-existing issue, or it happens on recent Firefox version?
Thank you.

Comment 3

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

Paul, do you know if we have any similar audio issue on Windows before? Or having any idea about why this issue would happen?
Thank you.

Comment 4

[Adrian]

(In reply to Alastor Wu [:alwu] from comment #2)

Hi, Adrian,
I wonder if this issue is a long-existing issue, or it happens on recent Firefox version?
Thank you.

I only noticed it last month while trying to switch to Firefox.
While researching the bug on Google I found a lot of bug reports very similar to mine, some from quite a while ago.
I also used mozregression to test old builds (back to 2015) and I can still reproduce the issue.

Comment 5

[Paul Adenot (:padenot)]

This is an AAC decoding problem I think, I can't repro on my Windows 10 laptop unfortunately, Adrian is on #media and I tried a few things, but I can't repro. This also reproduces on Twitch, that also uses AAC. Alastor, since you can repro, can you try to figure this one out? Since we know exactly when it happens in the audio, we should be able to set a breakpoint exactly in the function call when it happens, and see what's up.

Comment 6

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

Sure, will continue debugging to see if I can find the problem.

Comment 7

[Paul Adenot (:padenot)]

Alastor, it would be best to understand, when you find the fix, if this is widespread. I'm not able to reproduce on my windows laptop, and I've even tried updating the OS to the same version as the reporter, didn't help.

Comment 8

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

Still in investigation, will update information if I find some.

Comment 9

[Bryce Seager van Dyk [:bryce] (he/him) - Not reading bugmail]

Alastor, in case it helps, you could poke around where we get data out of the decoder (I'd expect this to be the WMFAudioMFTManager[0]). We could see if any of the special handling is being hit (type changes, discontinuities). Failing that, we could try logging values here and see if there's any obviously weird[1].

[0] https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/358cef5d1a87172f23b15e1a705d6f278db4cdad/dom/media/platforms/wmf/WMFAudioMFTManager.cpp#220
[1] https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/358cef5d1a87172f23b15e1a705d6f278db4cdad/dom/media/platforms/wmf/WMFAudioMFTManager.cpp#304

Comment 10

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

I didn't have any finding while I was debugging this issue the last time, and considering the severity of this issue and other tasks I currently have, I might not back to it in a near future, feel free to take this if anyone is interested in working on this.

Comment 11

[Paul Adenot (:padenot)]

afaik you're the only one here that can repro.

Comment 12

[Alastor Wu [:alwu]]

yep but now we have really huge amount of pending playback issues, some of them are more serious than this (eg. crash or not-able-to-play) so recently I won't be able to continue investigating this. Maybe worth to mention that, my device is Dell New XPS 15 Touch (9560) from the Hub.

Comment 14

[Adrian]

After 5 years, coming back to Firefox with new PC specifications and new audio devices, I no longer have this issue!