Sorry for the late reply, I spent some time in a hospital and haven’t been back for more than a couple of days. Anyways, I disabled pipewire, masked the services because they kept auto enabling themselves, installed and started pulseaudio and pulseaudio-alsa and audio is now 100% pop and crackle free. I know pulseaudio doesn’t have as good latency but for me it seems to work great. I am running a bunch of Ai image generation with stable diffusion in the background right now to load up my system/VM and running plex at the same time and the audio seems stable and pop free. So this proves the VM itself and my settings for it are not the issue and it is something with pipewire itself. At least it focuses the troubleshooting… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Currently I am playing round with the clock and timer settings hoping to get this working as close to ‘real time’ as possible.

I appreciate your input. Thankfully I did verify the rate changes were actually being applied. I could play around a bit more and see what I can pull off, fully disabling 48000 suppord I dont believe I have ever done so I will give it a go. At this point, anything is worth doing :D.

Here it is…

https://pastebin.com/M4LiUL5T

Whelp, it plays a 48000Hz sine wave through aplay just fine… I used sox to generate it. I’ll be frank, I am not entirely sure how else to test the audio system aside from just playing something. I believe pipewire being chosen as the default audio subsystem means pulse audio itself inst even needed or installed by arch install since pipewire has inbuilt compatibility with it, right? If this is the case, then I do not have pulse audio installed separately.

I would post my VM config but for some reason it’s not working? Ill try a pastebin…

Funny you mentioned that, I was just doing that exact thing for the third time about 3 minutes before I posted this. I guess I must have forgotten to clarify that it had been tried. Thanks for the tip.