How to Fix Cracking and Popping Sound ?

Hi,

Are there any of you who have installed the beta 1 of MacOS Ventura? The beta 2 should arrive next week.

Obviously, it's a beta version... But I'm still curious to know if it has solved the problem for some developer who would have installed Ventura.

Hi,

I've been dealing with cracking sound for months (Macbook Pro M1 14" 2021). I found out it occurs when there is some system load (high usage of RAM and CPU) and it affects any audio source (Spotify standalone app or web application, Youtube, Netflix...). After reboot it was ok, but as soon as there was more load, it started to happen again. I keep the system up to date and there was no difference after any update (macOS Monterey 12.4 right now). I've tried changing output format from 44100 to 96000 Hz, closing some background apps but keeping other, restarting coreaudiod after every step, but the issue was still there.

Looks like I've finally found the cause on my side! I've noticed "MSTeamsAudioDevice.driver" (running as Intel process), so I tried to remove it. Uninstalling MS Teams didn't help, I needed to delete /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL/MSTeamsAudioDevice.driver and force kill it. It's already few hours and no cracking sound (it was every 1-2 minutes before). I even tried to open more apps to use more RAM and started some benchmarks to put some load and so far so good, finally I'm enjoying a music :)

@Milos23 Interesting. I also have an old audio plugin in that directory, DVCPROHDAudio.plugin. Going to remove it and see what happens.

Unfortunately the issue is not fixed. I still can hear cracking sound almost every time when I connect/disconnect USB dock (power delivery, monitor, keyboard, mouse, Android tablet). And now I hear the cracking sound about every 10-15 minutes, without any idea what's causing it (I tried to quit some Intel processes, but that didn't help). After getting rid of the Teams audio driver it's much better, but definitely not solved. Next week I will be travelling, so I will use macbook without connected USB dock. I will update you whether this will make any difference.

I don't have any plugins or dongles or other audio hardware. I don't have MSTeams. I typically don't run Rosetta apps.

I really hope Ventura will be the end to this bug.

Same Problem, New mac book pro 14-inch M1 Pro Monterey 12.4. I upgraded from a 2015 Mac book pro 13 inches where I never had this problem. Speakers of the new Mac are excellent but the crackling is unsupportable. Some of my observations:

• I put the mac to sleep and rarely restart it. After restart, the problem goes away for some time but then comes back
• I noticed the crackling in the Spotify app and youtube videos played in Safari
• I use Teams MS for work and can't get rid of it but it does help when I quit it. Crackling comes back almost immediately when the Teams app is restarted.
• I used Teams on my old mac and have never had this problem, but it is true that I really listened to music without headphones because the speakers were just not that good.

Same issue here. So annoying

Same issue here - super annoying. Reboot seems to help but always come back

Same problem here. Constant crackling across all audio source, particularly the Apple Music app. I don't have bluetooth on and I don't have the Teams audio driver loaded.

I have a 2021 MacBook Pro/M1 Max running Monterey 12.4.

Please report this issue in feedback, this is one of the few that Apple has reached back out to me on. If they do, they will provide a method to log with ktrace and a few other things so they can look into it. Based on this it is definitely a known issue.

If you want a guaranteed way to trigger the crackling and popping, run a VM on the system. Especially a mac VM using the apple virtualization since that is 100% apple, but any should suffice. Or obviously a high cpu/gpu load for a while. Then exit the VM, just running it will start the problem and make it highly likely any cpu use will cause lots of popping, until you reboot.

My guess is it is a driver that causes a buffer to go nuts, as killing everything related to sound at a user level does not work, so it has to be something kernel level or something similar. Pay attention to the popping, many times it will be audio going out of sync and back into sync in time. Very obvious with youtube videos where it will glitch and sound like someone said something twice.

I was also asked to test the noise with playing "silent" audio. It never happens with silent which really makes me sure it is a buffer repeating/desync/catchup issue as a silent audio would not produce anything that would generate a desync, or you wouldn't notice it anyway.

BTW the teams driver may be AN issue, but it is not the cause. It is easy to generate with or without it installed, especially using the VM method above.

Same problem. So annoying if you listen music, watching youtube, when you make business calls and etc

Just FYI, I wiped my mac on Thursday (3 days ago) and had no distortions since. Started as fresh as I possibly could. Made a list of all apps installed and reinstalled most of them manually one by one. Only synced the keychain to my iCloud. The rest of the files (like .ssh folder, projects folder, save states for openemu, etc) were restored by manually copying them from my latest TM backup.

Today had to load the system memory heavily by running lots of docker containers and no distortions appeared (when in the past they would appear just before memory pressure turned orange).

I still suspect that this bug is somehow related to unsuccessful software (config/driver) migration from Intel to Apple silicon.

Will let you know if the distortions come back (fingers crossed they won't :)!

MacBook Pro 16-inch 2021 (MacBookPro18,1), M1 Pro chip OS 12.4 16GB RAM

Crackling occurs streaming video (Youtube, you name it, etc), listening to Music.app, in Google Meet, via headphones, onboard speakers, and connected audio a hardware interface (Presonus Audiobox iTwo) for music production. It DOES NOT occur with playback via AirPlay so seems related directly to M1 hardware. Tried an alternate OS account (same issue) but have not revived or restored the firmware via DFU. Seems from the amount of replies here that this is a much bigger issue. Hoping Apple will fix soon as it is completely aggravating.

Same issue. Just deleted MS teams driver. Hope it'll work, but still i need MS teams for work and not sure if i can use it without driver.

Same issue, macbook pro 2021, 16", Mac OS Monterey then Ventura. Ms teams installed, but crackings persists even when Teams is not launched