Audio crackles/pops

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

Welcome to ask.fedora @xmlp4hf44j6js

Did you install this, in Fedora VM’s ?
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/assembly_installing-plugins-for-playing-movies-and-music/

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.