pulseaudio-lower-latency.md

How to lower pulseaudio latency (for osu!)

This guide is not applicable if you are using PipeWire on your PC, which is common these days.

Based on ThePooN's guide. I'm just putting this here to keep things short.

• Make this folder if it already does not exist: /etc/pulse/daemon.conf.d/
  • You can use the command bellow to make this happen:

    sudo mkdir -p /etc/pulse/daemon.conf.d/
    

• Create this file /etc/pulse/daemon.conf.d/10-better-latency.conf
  • You can use the command bellow to make this happen:

    sudo nano /etc/pulse/daemon.conf.d/10-better-latency.conf
    

    • You can press Ctrl+X, then Y and then Enter to save changes.
  • Put the following inside: (Right click and paste)

    high-priority = yes
    nice-level = -15
    
    realtime-scheduling = yes
    realtime-priority = 50
    
    resample-method = speex-float-0
    
    default-fragments = 4
    default-fragment-size-msec = 2

    • You can adjust the last 2 values if this does not work for you, or you get crackling audio.
• Edit this file: /etc/pulse/default.pa
  • You can use the command bellow to make this happen:

    sudo nano /etc/pulse/default.pa
    

    • You can press Ctrl+X, then Y and then Enter to save changes.
  • Locate this line: load-module module-udev-detect
    • Append tsched=0 to it so it looks like this load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0
• Create this file: /etc/security/limits.d/10-audio.conf
  • You can use the command bellow to make this happen:

    sudo nano /etc/security/limits.d/10-audio.conf
    

    • You can press Ctrl+X, then Y and then Enter to save changes.
  • Put the following inside:

    @audio - nice -20
    @audio - rtprio 99
    

    • Replace @audio with your username or add your user account to the audio group by sudo gpasswd -a YOUR_USERNAME audio.
• Reboot