When initiating the a call on my Lenovo X1 Carbon, there is no sound output. Even the skype test sound does not play. The pulseaudio settings seem ok, other applications like empathy work fine. After hanging up and calling again I get loud noise (not white noise, but heavily distorted). This noise does not go away by hanging up. I have to shutdown skype to get rid of the noise. The problem is present using internal and external microphone/speakers. Skype works well under Ubuntu 13.04. The result does not depend on the source of the Skype package (rpm+tar from skype.com, rpm for FC-20 from http://negativo17.org/skype-and-skype-pidgin-plugin/). F-20 alpha + all updates: pulseaudio-4.0-4.gita89ca pulseaudio-libs-4.0-4.gita89ca alsa-plugins-pulseaudio-1.0.27 alsa-lib-1.0.27.2-2 kernel-3.11.3-301 Steps to Reproduce: 1. Make Skype (test) call. Notice that sound (output) does not work. Hang up. 2. Make Skype (test) call. Noice/heavily distorted sound output lspci -v: 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04) Subsystem: Lenovo Device 21f9 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 47 Memory at f1510000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
Skype is doing the same thing on a Dell Inspiron 560, running Fedora 20-Alpha. This did not occur until the last spate of updates to various codecs and pulseaudio. 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801JI (ICH10 Family) HD Audio Controller Subsystem: Dell Device 0439 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 46 Memory at f7df8000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2 Capabilities: [60] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+ Capabilities: [70] Express Root Complex Integrated Endpoint, MSI 00 Capabilities: [100] Virtual Channel Capabilities: [130] Root Complex Link Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
See http://community.skype.com/t5/Linux/Crackling-and-unusable-sound-with-pulseaudio-4-0-proposed-fix/td-p/1683361 which includes a workaround until skype is fixed.