[Linux] Microphone stutter/crackle in Rock Band series

[TacoDeBoss]

Quick summary

In the Rock Band games, microphone input stutters and crackles on Linux systems with PipeWire.

Details

mic.webm

Tested on build v0.0.34-17529-e97bfecb with PS3 system firmware 4.91.
Does not appear to be a regression. Issue present back to build v0.0.29-15628-8e4945ab.

Tested with an Audio Technica ATR2100x via USB and a Shure SM58 over XLR with a Focusrite Scarlett Solo audio interface. The issue is noticeable mostly in the loopback audio, but extremely unreliable pitch detection ingame suggests to me that the input itself is being mishandled in some way.

Tested on Cubeb and FAudio outputs, with audio buffering both disabled and enabled from 32ms to 100ms, with timestretch both disabled and enabled at 75% threshold. Also tried 16-bit audio, and all available microphone types.

Logs indicate the sample rate for audio playback and cellMic input are always forced to 48kHz, I would like to have tested this at 44.1, but this does not appear to be a user-facing value that can be changed.

Attempted to test with native PulseAudio instead of pipewire-pulse, but I was not able to find a distro old enough to still ship PulseAudio by default that supported my GPU, and I wasn't interested in breaking my setup by trying to clobber PipeWire and force a Pulse install.

Log attached from my install of Rock Band 3 Deluxe, which has a lot of junk in the log due to DLC being loaded, and also a log from Rock Band 1 with no DLC to cut down on the fluff you have to read through. RB1 presents a crash at the end of the log which always happens when quitting the game, and seems irrelevant.

Attach a log file

rb1RPCS3.log
rb3dxRPCS3.log

Attach capture files for visual issues

No response

System configuration

  Host: sharashka2 Kernel: 6.13.4-zen1-1-zen arch: x86_64 bits: 64
  Desktop: KDE Plasma v: 6.3.1 Distro: EndeavourOS
Machine:
  Type: Desktop System: Gigabyte product: B550M DS3H AC v: -CF
    serial: <superuser required>
  Mobo: Gigabyte model: B550M DS3H AC v: x.x serial: <superuser required>
    UEFI: American Megatrends LLC. v: F4 date: 03/22/2024
CPU:
  Info: 8-core AMD Ryzen 7 5800X [MT MCP] speed (MHz): avg: 1752
    min/max: 550/4851
Graphics:
  Device-1: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Navi 32 [Radeon RX 7700 XT /
    7800 XT] driver: amdgpu v: kernel
  Display: wayland server: X.org v: 1.21.1.15 with: Xwayland v: 24.1.5
    compositor: kwin_wayland driver: X: loaded: amdgpu
    unloaded: modesetting,radeon dri: radeonsi gpu: amdgpu resolution:
    1: 1440x900~60Hz 2: 1920x1080~180Hz 3: 1920x1080~60Hz
  API: OpenGL v: 4.6 compat-v: 4.5 vendor: amd mesa v: 24.3.4-arch1.1
    renderer: AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT (radeonsi navi32 LLVM 19.1.7 DRM 3.60
    6.13.4-zen1-1-zen)
  Info: Tools: api: clinfo, eglinfo, glxinfo, vulkaninfo
    de: kscreen-console,kscreen-doctor gpu: radeontop wl: wayland-info
    x11: xdpyinfo, xprop, xrandr
Network:
  Device-1: Realtek RTL8821CE 802.11ac PCIe Wireless Network Adapter
    driver: rtw_8821ce
  Device-2: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8211/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet
    driver: r8169
  Device-3: Sony DualSense wireless controller (PS5)
    driver: playstation,snd-usb-audio,usbhid type: USB
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 5.94 TiB used: 4.78 TiB (80.4%)
Info:
  Memory: total: 32 GiB available: 31.26 GiB used: 6.61 GiB (21.1%)
  Processes: 391 Uptime: 58m Shell: fish inxi: 3.3.37

Other details

This issue is known to affect multiple users.
philcunliffe on Issue #13310
tprox on RPCS3 Discord #help
Fewffwa on RPCS3 Discord #help

[oznogon]

I can reliably reproduce on RPCS3 and both vanilla Rock Band 3 and Rock Band 3 Deluxe.

I'm running Fedora 41 / KDE Plasma 6 / PipeWire on a Framework 13 AMD 7640U laptop.

Microphone is a Logitech Rock Band USB mono mic, model A-0234A, reporting via lsusb as ID 046d:0a03 Logitech, Inc. Logitech USB Microphone

log head:

RPCS3 v0.0.34-17530-207ee59a Alpha | HEAD
AMD Ryzen 5 7640U w/ Radeon 760M Graphics | 12 Threads | 30.65 GiB RAM | TSC: Disabled | AVX-512+ | FMA3
Operating system: POSIX, Name: Linux, Release: 6.12.15-200.fc41.x86_64, Version: #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Tue Feb 18 15:24:05 UTC 2025
Qt version: Compiled against Qt 6.8.2 | Run-time uses Qt 6.8.2
Current Time: 2025-02-28T09:53:58
·! 0:00:00.000001 SYS: Initialization times before main(): 0.131937s
·! 0:00:00.000010 SYS: argc: 1, argv: '/tmp/.mount_rpcs3CoMJCE/AppRun.wrapped'
·! 0:00:00.000023 SYS: Maximum open file descriptors: 4096
·! 0:00:00.080017 UUID: Installation ID: {4cf63d36-6262-47d6-9b6c-e0cb471b9ad3}
·A 0:00:00.196428 {Vulkan Device Enumeration Thread} RSX: Found Vulkan-compatible GPU: 'AMD Radeon 760M (RADV GFX1103_R1)' running on driver 24.3.4

RPCS3.log