Hey guys, quick PSA if you ever run into audio dropouts or HDMI handshake issues with your Linux music machine.
Over the last 1-2 days, I have been experiencing an issue where some FLAC files had an audio dropout when they started to play, no matter what player I tried. The first second or so was silent. It confused the hell out of me, because until 2 days ago, Mint had been playing back my audio perfectly, even better than Ubuntu (see my post above).
After some digging, I noticed that the dropout reflected on my receiver's screen by the controls flashing off for the duration of the dropout (e.g., the speaker icons disappeared for a moment). I immediately thought, oh shit, HDMI handshake!!
Dug some more and found this thread on Ubuntu Forums:
https://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-2215224.html
It turns out that you need to start the PulseAudio loopback module, which will keep HDMI alive at all times.
Steps (for Linux Mint or Ubuntu):
1. Open Startup Applications
2. Click on "Add"
3. Name it e.g. "Keep HDMI alive"
4. The command is
pactl load-module module-loopback
5. No more dropouts!