Fixing Crackling/Buzzing Audio on Pipewire

pipewire-crackling-fix.md

Fixing Crackling/Buzzing Audio on Pipewire

Quick potential fix for crackling/buzzing audio issues

Check values of these two files:

cat /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/max_user_freq
cat /proc/sys/dev/hpet/max-user-freq

If they have defaulted back to 64 for whatever resaon, that's likely causing your crackling. You can fix it by running the following commands

sudo -i
echo 2048 > /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/max_user_freq
echo 2048 > /proc/sys/dev/hpet/max-user-freq

then restart pipewire with

systemctl --user restart pipewire.service

(or you can reboot if that's easier)

This should fix the crackling!

Not sure if it was the new values that did it, but this appears to work 👍👍👍 Thanks!

While I can make a qualified guess, I haven't looked up what these values represent yet.

(Pipewire 1.2.6)