Audio crackles/pops

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I’m hearing crackles/pops every few seconds during audio/video playback. I strongly suspect this is a pipewire or wireplumber issue. It persists after warm and cold boots, not just waking from sleep. I note I am in a virtual machine and that my non-Fedora VMs do not have this problem.

Things I’ve tried:

  • For over a year, I’ve worked around this by sudo dnf install pulseaudio --allowerasing. However, after my last sudo dnf upgrade --refresh, I could not hear any audio and reverted via sudo dnf install pipewire-pulseaudio --allowerasing.
  • Raising the priority of the playback process(es) to “Very High” (i.e. -20) reduces the frequency of crackles/pops. However, the audio is still intolerable.
  • Copying /usr/share/pipewire/pipewire.conf and /usr/share/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf to ~/.config/pipewire/, uncommenting the default.clock “quantum” settings, increasing their values (up to 65536), and rebooting does not seem to help.

Fedora 36 Workstation (current updates)
VirtualBox 6.1.38 (latest)
Mozilla Firefox 105.0.2

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A few packages were not installed. I’ve since installed everything and rebooted. During light testing, the crackling/popping persists. However, it may be slightly reduced.