I’m running Xubuntu 21.04 and when I’m listening to
mixcloud and visit certain sites using Firefox the
sound starts to crackle and gets distorted. It can only be resolved by
restarting Firefox, but restarting the browser is quite annoying. I added a
bookmark to the URL “about:RestartRequired” to make the process a little less
painful. I had to restart my browser fairly often until I found the following
fixes to resolve the problem and find the cause.
Fix 1:
Go to about:config in Firefox and search for “media.webspeech.synth.enabled”
and set it to “false” (double clicking on the entry should do it) then close
Firefox. Don’t forget to restart Firefox.
Fix 2:
It seems related to speech-dispatcher (some text-to-speech utility), so you can try:
killall speech-dispatcher
If the sound comes back to normal you can remove it completely (if you don’t need it) with:
sudo apt remove speech-dispatcher
Don’t forget to restart Firefox.
Speech Synthesis
The bug has something to do with Ubuntu and Speech Synthesis and may be related to Firefox. When websites use the experimental “SpeechSynthesis” API the bug appears. It can be triggered by pressing F12 and entering the following in the console:
let utterance = new SpeechSynthesisUtterance("Hello world!");
speechSynthesis.speak(utterance);
After pressing “Enter” you will hear “Hello World” and all other audio will be crackling and distorted until you restart Firefox.