I was experiencing crackling/popping sounds while playing music with Rhythmbox in my Debian GNU/Linux Testing (Bookworm) system. The noises start when starting music playback and stop as soon as I stop the playback.
I came around this bug report for Pipewire but I’m currently still using PulseAudio 15 instead. However it contained a comment which led to the solution: speech-dispatcher is known for causing problems of crackling sounds.
Speech-dispatcher is used for speech synthesis often used by blind or visually impaired people. If you don’t use this functionality, you can either disable speech-dispatcher (speechd) or completely uninstall it:
Disable speech-dispatcher by editing /etc/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf, removing the comment sign # before this line near the end of the file:
DisableAutoSpawnThen you will have to log out and log in your desktop or you can kill all speech-dispatcher processes manually.
If you want, you can remove speech-dispatcher completely by running this command:
# apt remove speech-dispatcherNote that this will remove the gnome meta-package, which in itself is harmless, but might lead to new GNOME components not being installed automatically in the future.
This fixed the constant popping crackling noises while playing music completely for me.