USB Soundcard restarts when sound stops

[lowgain]

I recently attached my Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 (note: older model than shown here) USB audio interface to my Manjaro desktop.

Generally it seems to be working well, but if I stop / close any applications playing sound, the interface will turn off (power light goes dark) until sound starts playing again. This wouldn’t be a big deal except that my interface is attached to two externally-powered monitors, and whenever the interface starts up again the monitors emit a loud “popping” noise which is probably not great for them.

My initial guess is that this is more of a software thing (eg. deciding to disable the device when it isn’t in use) rather than the audio interface itself, but as I’m fairly new to Linux audio I’m not sure the best place to look. I’m using the XFCE version of Manjaro - not sure if XFCE’s Audio mixer could be the issue or something lower-level (is this a behaviour of PulseAudio / ALSA in general that can be configured? Is it in fact the device itself?).

Thanks, any guidance here would be appreciated!

[xabbu]

Do you use TLP? If so you might want to stop/disable it.

Power saving sometimes interfere with USB and Sound in general.

[nikgnomic]

suggest disable pulseaudio module suspend-on-idle temporarily

pacmd unload-module module-suspend-on-idle

if that works Pulseaudio configuration can be changed to disable the module permanently

sudo sed -i 's/load-module module-suspend-on-idle/#load-module module-suspend-on-idle/g' /etc/pulse/default.pa

this adds a comment tag ‘#’ at the start of the line to stop module being loaded

[lowgain]

Thanks @nikgnomic, disabling that module seems to take care of it - I will update the config file.

Thanks as well @xabbu - I am not sure if TLP is enabled or not but I appreciate being aware of its existence for the future!

[RapidScampi]

hooray. Very relieved to find this - constant pops were driving me crazy! Many thnaks

[phpTANKER]

Just tried this and it seems to work so far. Thanks was driving me crazy.