extreme noise with sound

I have a similar problem.
Workaround (worked for me): try switching audio output module to alsa.

Audio hw is:
Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)

You're right, this only happens with Pulse. Thanks for that.

VLC 1.1 does software volume internally (according to the volume level in the VLC UI). The base levels have not changed since ages, and are the exact same for either ALSA and PulseAudio output plugins. (This will change in VLC 1.2 that integrates with PulseAudio volume control but Ubuntu is not there yet.)

From your bug description, it sounds like PulseAudio (or a PulseAudio volume control application) is setting the default volume of VLC streams too high - when VLC outputs directly to PulseAudio via libpulse that is.

I've just tried to prove your assumption. I came to no clear conclusion, but to a fine, noiselessly playing vlc. I am confused, which is why I'll just describe my observations.

The only constant for all my trials is that the visual part of video with pulse and audio+visual part of video with alsa worked fine in all conditions.

What did I do?

I upgraded pulse to 1:0.9.22+stable-queue-24-g67d18-0ubuntu3.1.
-> audio with noise
-> additional observation (didn't observe this before, I guess I would have noticed, but neither specially checked for it): When sliding forward in video from position (A) to position (B), video plays from (B), audio plays from (B), but *additionally* for about 5 secs audio from (A) is still played simultaniously

I lowered the volume level of vlc from 130 % to 75 % and restarted vlc, so it started with 75%.
-> audio with noise

I set "Dolby Surround" to "off"; previously it was "auto" (I do only have two stereo boxes).
-> audio without noise, no other problems, everything is fine!

I set "Dolby Surround" to "on" (expecting the noise again).
-> audio without noise

I set "Dolby Surround" to "auto", setting volume to 130% (expecting the noise again).
-> audio without noise

As said, vlc does now play fine with pulse and I can't reproduce the problem anymore.

(Vague idea: While I continously update my software, my /home including config files are never reset. Might there be some sound releated configuration option not directly set from the GUI, but indirectly (option dolby surround automatically sets someBufferSetupInternalOption to 2d9a92f) and some old indirect value survived, hasn't been consistent with the controls visible in the new vlc's GUI, but has been used anyway? - I'll get the backup of my data and investigate).

I'm able to reproduce it using my backups. It seems to be related to the volume levels, as you've suspected.

== Trials ==

Conditions:
Time A ... configuration from where I filed the bug
Time B ... configuration from my post where I haven't been able to reproduce it anymore
Config file V ... config file of vlc ($HOME/.config/vlc/*)
Config file P ... config and state files (incl. volume levels) of pulse ($HOME/.pulse/*)

So let's mix these. First trial period consists of all the possible combinations:

AV+AP: noise
AV+BP: noise
BV+AP: noise
BV+BP: no noise

However, using the new config BV seems to alter something important in P:

1) fire up BV+AP, result: noise
After vlc started, the pulse config/state file 657b92791ebe658fba9f363b4ba14252-stream-volumes.tdb has changed
2) Now firing up vlc yields some very subtle noise at the very begin of playing, but overall 'no noise'.
3) Afterwards there's not even subtle noise at the beginning

I've attached both versions of the stream-volumes.tdb

== Conclusions ==

Looks like pulse has ceased to run fine with some stream-volume settings which it had set on its own in a previous version.

== Messages ==
Observation unrelated to above's trials:

The following message is shown on console independent on whether there is noise or not:
[aac @ 0x1b63650]Transition from an ONLY_LONG or LONG_STOP to an EIGHT_SHORT sequence detected. If you heard an audible artifact, please submit the sample to the FFmpeg developers.

CORRECTION: There's a mistake in the trial table for AV+BP (must have confused the lines when re-arranging/changing descriptions for better readability):

AV+AP: noise
AV+BP: no noise <= sorry, this was wrong in the post above
BV+AP: noise
BV+BP: no noise

Addition: when firing up AV+BP, the same suble noise as in BV+AP step 2 is audible at startup

FWIW, I think this symptom is another manifestation of the various "corrupt" databases that pulse doesn't deal with gracefully. Honestly I don't think this is going to be fixed in a backward-compatible manner; there have been recent git commits to add tagstruct versioning to the db files.

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

As described in comment #5, turning off "Dolby surround" in VLC options solved the issue for me.

my 2 cents - I played with alsa/pulse switching in the options... the same noise.

then I turned the Dolby surround off ( was Auto before that ) - noise.

( After each )settings change I restart vlc )

Finally I turned the dolby surround on and - no noise initially but on the second restart noise again.

After I hear the noise if I rewind forward on back or if I pause and resume or I play with the playback speed I can stop the noise but it comes again in 10 secs usually....

bye bye vlc - will look to use another player for a while until someone fixes it.

I can fund this bugfix with 50 euro if somebody can fix it....

ubuntu precise on a dell xps 15 l502x with xfce4

Thank you for reporting this bug to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 11.04 (natty) reached end-of-life on October 28, 2012.

See this document for currently supported Ubuntu releases:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

We appreciate that this bug may be old and you might not be interested in discussing it any more. But if you are then please upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version and re-test.

I'm now on Ubuntu 16.04 xenial.

VLC now actually plays music, but the UI freezes when I click play/select a file (so the music *is* playing even while the UI is frozen). MPlayer, Clementine et all do just fine on my machine. I'll enter another bug report for that.

[Expired for pulseaudio (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]