The big one I see across most distros is: Pipewire needs better default minimum quants.
I see so many complaints about crackling audio and it’s almost always that pipewire defaults to using a tiny buffer for lower latency and system load (like gaming) can cause the buffers to empty resulting in crackling.
If this happens, you can fix it temporarily (it’ll last until you reboot):
pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock force-quantum 256
Increase the 256 to 512 or higher until the crackling goes away (it doesn’t need to be a power of two, any integer will work). It’ll take effect immediately you don’t need to restart pipewire.
For most popular distros most stuff works out of the gate. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to wrestle with anything vexing.
The big one I see across most distros is: Pipewire needs better default minimum quants.
I see so many complaints about crackling audio and it’s almost always that pipewire defaults to using a tiny buffer for lower latency and system load (like gaming) can cause the buffers to empty resulting in crackling.
If this happens, you can fix it temporarily (it’ll last until you reboot):
Increase the 256 to 512 or higher until the crackling goes away (it doesn’t need to be a power of two, any integer will work). It’ll take effect immediately you don’t need to restart pipewire.