there is some crackling with plenty of forum posts explaining how to fix these things going back to 2005 that are no longer relevant because the sound uses something with a different name now.
This is almost always because your pipewire buffers are too small (because of the defaults erring on the side of low latency) and so when the CPU is busy the buffers empty and you get some crackling. Use pw-top to see all of your devices and sources, next to the devices you should see a number in the QUANT column. Chances are that this is really low (or 1)
You can change your minimum buffer (pipewire calculates this by setting a ‘quantum’), temporarily with :
pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.min-quantum 512
You can edit /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf and add a line under the [clocks] section:
default.clock.min-quantum = 512
Restart pipewire for the setting to take effect:
systemctl --user restart pipewire
(If your sound ever just dies for no reason, restarting pipewire is often all you need to do)
Use the temporary setting to increase the number. Lower number means a shorter buffer so, you get less audio latency in exchange for the risk of the buffer emptying. I don’t have much problem with 256, but sometimes Proton adds some extra CPU overhead and I’ll bump it up to 512.
This is almost always because your pipewire buffers are too small (because of the defaults erring on the side of low latency) and so when the CPU is busy the buffers empty and you get some crackling. Use pw-top to see all of your devices and sources, next to the devices you should see a number in the QUANT column. Chances are that this is really low (or 1)
You can change your minimum buffer (pipewire calculates this by setting a ‘quantum’), temporarily with :
You can edit /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf and add a line under the [clocks] section:
Restart pipewire for the setting to take effect:
(If your sound ever just dies for no reason, restarting pipewire is often all you need to do)
Use the temporary setting to increase the number. Lower number means a shorter buffer so, you get less audio latency in exchange for the risk of the buffer emptying. I don’t have much problem with 256, but sometimes Proton adds some extra CPU overhead and I’ll bump it up to 512.