Fix Audio on XFCE Chromebook

The Problem

After moving from GalliumOS to Xubuntu, I noticed that playing YouTube videos on both Firefox and Chromium would result in decent playback for a few minutes, but suddenly the audio would turn into a solid beeping tone while the YouTube video displayed the white loading circle on top of the video as it continued trying to play.

The beeping sound would continue until I paused the video for long enough for the beep to stop on its own, or just close the tab. According to some forums around the net, it seemed to be an audio codec or driver issue. After a bit of digging through posts of similar but not exact audio issues, I found one that seemed to match my situation exactly.

The Solution

Apparently this was an issue with running a kernel that didn’t support and/or didn’t have a Sound Open Firmware (SOF) driver installed. Someone brought up an issue on their Github page and a solution was found and shared. This solution was also referenced in a few other places, so I gave it a shot and it 100% worked.

You can install the drivers with this epic bash script (please check it out before running it):

wget -qO- https://gist.github.com/heikomat/3fe272431b44b580c933bfb901a92257/raw | bash

And once that script completes, tack on options snd_sof sof_debug=1 to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

Reboot your computer and that should take care of the audio issues when playing videos or music.