Fix Crackling Sound – Linux Mint

I run Mint as the OS on my main computer at home. For the most part it gives me no trouble, I can do everything I need to do on it far quicker and reliably than I ever could on a windows machine. Between growing Linux support for software natively and Wine I dont ever see a need to return to Windows.

However every once in a while I will get crazy distortion randomly popping up. I could be watching a YouTube video or playing a game and the sounds will become incredibly crackily and distorted. I finally found a fix though.

Open up a terminal session and just type pulseaudio -k. That will kill the sound daemon. Restart it with pulseaudio --start. After that your sound should return to normal.

5 thoughts on “Fix Crackling Sound – Linux Mint”

  1. I’m new to Linux Mint and I have been running into the problem a lot – I’m not exactly sure how to resolve it long term, but the solution you’ve expressed here is a great help!

    Thanks! 🙂

    Reply
  2. Thanks for your advice, it works brilliant on MX Linux as well 😉

    I had a problem with audio recording and all ways (ffmpeg recording, audacity and ocenaudio, simplescreenrecorder and some others) were giving crackling in audio.

    Restarting pulseaudio with -k and –start fixed it in seconds.

    So, thank you again! 😉

    Reply

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