Audio Issues in Unraid Ubuntu VM - Crackling sounds followed by a frozen computer


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I'm trying to run an Ubuntu 20.04 VM in Unraid as my main computer. I'm coming from 6 months of successful VM experience with Windows 10, but I've decided to move to Ubuntu.

 

Motherboard: ASRock X399 Taichi

CPU: Ryzen Threadripper 1920X 12-core

GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (using a vbios that worked great in Windows 10)

Alternate GPU: Old AMD Radeon HD 6950 that I don't/haven't used for anything right now but is in the machine

 

I installed Ubuntu yesterday and everything has worked smoothly except for audio. When I tried playing music on speakers using motherboard audio with Spotify, my computer immediately froze. The mouse could still move, but all windows were completely inoperable and the keyboard unusable. The only option was to connect to Unraid dashboard from laptop and force shut it down.

 

I tried again and got a minute or two of crackling audio coming out my headphones (CoolerMaster MH752: they're usb with their own sound card) before the same freezing. I did some googling and stumbled upon this stackexchange post, where the "pci=nomsi" solution got me a few minutes of solid playback through speakers. Headphones didn't work though and switching to an hdmi audio source crashed the computer.

 

I do not know if this is an Unraid or Ubuntu problem, but I just switched my Lenovo laptop to Ubuntu as well and it's been working fine (aside from the fingerprint sensor, but that's a different question).

 

It's worth mentioning that I was having some audio problems in Windows before I switched. When I first set up my computer all the passthrough worked just fine, but my random inexplicable audio issues in Windows have increased slowly for the past two months. First my audio would freeze only occasionally, then break whenever I merely opened the audio settings (???), and near the end all output would fail mysteriously in zoom every half hour or so until I restarted programs. At this point I would just like to be able to use Ubuntu with audio that works consistently. I would prefer that my headphones, motherboard audio, and graphics card hdmi audio all worked, but I could settle for the first two or even just the headphones plus buying a cheap USB sound card.

 

As far as logs go, I haven't seen any errors in Unraid. In Ubuntu I tried leaving system logs open during a crash (on the "important" tab) but I got nothing. I would assume the computer video freezing meant it didn't update the log display.

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