I'm running an older linux (I think it's ubuntu 14.? or something ... I could check if it makes a difference) on a laptop as a karaoke box. Really simple: Select a song and play it out though the built-in audio to an amp (well, a bit more complex since the file is a midi and it's played via timidity).

I find that the start of every song presents some distortion for about a second. I'm assuming that it has to do with the audio port being opened or initialized.

Any thoughts on this?