Pipewire tweak (crackling popping fix)

General system Gaming, sound and video
1

So was recently getting some random crackling/popping in pipewire and having trouble reproducing it. Doing some digging i found out that pipewire has two buffers. Long story short I fixed my crackling issue by adjusting my quantum levels. So if you’re having any issues here’s something to try.

Check pw-top that will show you a realtime view of device and node stats.
Then, if you haven’t already, create a global (/etc) or profile (/home) config file. Examples commands using profile config:
cp /usr/share/pipewire/pipewire.conf ~/.config/pipewire/

then edit your pipewire.conf:
nano ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf

These are the changes I made, adjust based on your system resources:

    default.clock.quantum       = 32
    default.clock.min-quantum   = 16
    default.clock.max-quantum   = 768

Finally restart pipewire. I’m not sure exactly if you need to restart all these services but, I did and it worked fine.
systemctl --user restart pipewire pipewire-pulse wireplumber pipewire-socket

You can check that they back up and running with this:
systemctl --user status pipewire pipewire-pulse wireplumber pipewire-socket

I also ran across this Manjaro post that might be helpful as well.

2 Likes
2

Thanks. I Have following this guide on Kubuntu 23.10 “Mantic Minotaur” and work perfectly with Easyeffects. And i have disable suspend on wireplumber following this link: Disable Pipewire Suspend on Idle to avoid audio pops, delays, and white noise
(Of course i have bookmark it on Firefox Web Browser for reference future usage)

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Worked for me, but I had to set different values:

default.clock.quantum       = 4096
default.clock.min-quantum   = 512
default.clock.max-quantum   = 16384