Bazzite audio crackling

Hello, brand new to this forum and a recent bazzite user (LOVING IT). I am hitting my first real issue and wondering if there’s any known bugs/issues around it - my audio keeps crackling. This happens generally when there’s a bigger variation in volume, happens with both speakers and headset, in and out of games (most noticeable when listening to people talking on discord but not confined to that at all). I can consistently reproduce it with the “ding” when changing system volume as well. I can and will provide more specific information, but wanted to field the question more generally first to see if anyone could point me in a good direction.

Operating System: Bazzite 40
KDE Plasma Version: 6.2.0
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.7.0
Qt Version: 6.7.2
Kernel Version: 6.9.12-210.fsync.fc40.x86_64 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 32 × AMD Ryzen 9 3950X 16-Core Processor
Memory: 62.7 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT
Manufacturer: ASUS (custom build by me)

Speakers - Creative Stage v2 pro (USB)
Headset - Astro A50 (USB)

I have not messed too much with the audio subsystem (pretty novice to linux comparatively to many here I’m sure), just tried selecting different audio profiles (Analog, Digital Stereo, Pro) with differences in quality but no fix to this crackling issue. Any assistance is greatly appreciated, please let me know if I can provide additional information to help troubleshoot. Thank you!

Just occurred to me I could provide the information from “Info Center” for my audio devices, if helpful.

I got this issue too!

I’m curious if it has to do with pipewire? I’m not well versed on it though.

Hi everyone,

i do have the same issues especially with audio playback in Lollypop.

Games are mostly running fine and Discord was always a shitty mess.
I stumbled upon a reddit post suggesting to use xwayland instead of wayland natively.
For that i revoked the permission for wayland in flatseal.
Audio playback got a lot better but still not perfect. Only getting distortions if i wildly hover over tracks in my album. I read new pipewire package got a ton of fixes and the new Gnome 48 should be more performant as well - maybe next release might fix those issues?

Other suggested not using on-board audio but i still got those issues on my DAC as well.

My Specs:

Operating System: Bazzite 41
Gnome Version: 47
Kernel Version: Linux 6.13.7-108.bazzite.fc41.x86_64
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 16 × AMD Ryzen 7 5700G 8-Core Processor
Memory: 32 GB of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT
Manufacturer: MSI (custom build by me)

Speakers - Creative Inspire 5100ish (On-Board)
Headset - beyerdynamic DT880 Pro (hooked on USB DAC Fiio K5 Pro)

I believe there has been a github issue for this for a while, as well. Will link that here. Hopefully it’s relevant. Audio stuttering in many games in Gamescope w/ 6700XT · Issue #851 · ublue-os/bazzite · GitHub

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cool, thank you for sharing the link.
It seems that there are many factors to consider. Most people using DACs are not hit by the issue.
The majority is facing issues with HDMI audio. As mentioned in the posts on reddit and github the kernel args are already present on bazzite.

Some suggest to configure pipewire further.
For now running my audio player through xwayland seems to work most of the time.

That whole issue is really strange, when i started using bazzite in december last year i had no issues.