On a few occasions I've hit this problem in Linux Mint, that the sound suddenly starts cracking or buzzing, having a constant noise in the background. The sound quality gets really bad - and the music is not enjoyable anymore.
I've occasionally experienced this problem on Linux Mint 20.1 and 20.2. But other Linux Mint (and maybe even other Linux distributions) might have the same problem.
Unfortunately I have (as of now) no idea what exactly is causing this problem - however it could have something to do when the browser (Firefox?) is loading multimedia content in the background. Even though it's not actively played.
Another idea hints that it might be a problem with two sound cards:
After some research I learned that the AMD High Definition Audio Device (found through Control Panel -> Device Manager -> Sound, video and game controllers) is responsible for sending audio through the graphics processor's HDMI output. I figured that could be the link between video and audio.
This workstation does indeed have "two" sound cards, as the GPU also features a HDMI port which forwards sound to a screen:
ckadm@mintp ~ $ lspci|grep Audio
04:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Ellesmere HDMI Audio [Radeon RX 470/480 / 570/580/590]
06:00.4 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Starship/Matisse HD Audio Controller
Rather by chance I discovered a quick fix. Whenever this sound problem appears, simply open the "Driver Manager". Wait until it has finished loading, then simply close the "Driver Manager" program again.
Notice that the sound suddenly goes back to normal, without any cracking or buzzing or constant noise in the background!
It's kind of difficult to describe a typical multimedia/sound problem with words. Hence I created a video which is now on YouTube, where the workaround is shown.
Of course a day after this workaround article was published, the workaround doesn't seem to work anymore. At least in most cases (works maybe every third time). However the sound issue can be reproduced now. The crackling sound usually appears when the computer was freshly booted, some music is playing (doesn't matter whether the music plays from a player such as VLC or through a web radio) and then Firefox is started. It seems that loading ads in Firefox triggers this crackling sound.
In my case I can reproduce the sound problem:
Additional research could actually be a hardware problem. My machine runs the following setup as of this day:
According to a Reddit post, the issue could be in the AMD X5XX chipset. Users have reported that this chipset has USB issues and also causes crackling sound and AMD released AGESA 1.2.0.2 to address these issues. Another Vlogger, TheFullSetup, also mentioned crackling audio in his AMD B550 motherboard and that these issues are gone after a BIOS upgrade.
As mentioned above, my current BIOS version is 1.80. This version contains the AGESA 1.2.0.0 version. The next BIOS version, 1.90, would actually contain AGESA 1.2.0.2 (with the potential fix?). And as of this writing, BIOS 2.20 with AGESA 1.2.0.3 Patch C is also available. I will definitely give the BIOS upgrade a shot.
After upgrading the BIOS to 2.20, the problem can unfortunately still be reproduced.
Another (so far working) workaround is when you temporarily change the audio output to a different device (e.g. headset) and then switch back to the default output again.
Open the Sound Settings, either with a click to the bottom right sound icon, then click on "Sound Settings", or simply search for "Sound" in the menu.
In the "Output" tab, you should see all the available audio devices. In my case my default device is the sound card (Starship/Matisse HD Audio Controller).
After changing the output to another device, the Digital Output of the Jabra EVOLVE LINK MS, waiting a few seconds, followed by yet another change back to the default sound card - and the crackling is gone.
After having endured these audio problems for over a year, I finally stumbled on the real cause of this crackling audio! It's the speech-dispatcher package!
The speech-dispatcher processes can manually be triggered by using the spd-say command. This reproduces the audio crackling, as you can see in the new video:
A couple of programs, such as the spd-say command or the Firefox browser (coming mostly from ads), are able to launch the speech-dispatcher processes. As soon as this happens, the audio crackling starts as long as the processes run.
The final solution? Remove the speech-dispatcher package:
ckadm@mintp ~ $ sudo apt-get remove speech-dispatcher
Brendan from wrote on Mar 14th, 2024:
I tried Stephan's technique (switching to `AudioOutputMethod "libao"` in /etc/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf) and it worked!
Thx all for ur posts!
Dalton from wrote on Oct 6th, 2023:
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On Linux Mint 21.1 I had a crackling sound that sounded like a buffer underrun or a missing sample. Really small but annoying and a couple of them per second. Could not figure out what was causing it and it happened on multiple output devices. I tried editing configs all over the place, I tried removing programs one by one.
Once I found this page and saw that Firefox triggered it for you, I tried closing Firefox and restarting everything. Once it went away I removed speech-dispatcher since I don't need it for anything.
Thank you so much. My system is slightly borked from dependency hell but this delays my re-installation until next LTS release. Lesson learned: Do not install conflicting programs that are known to conflict and let them both run. Use Arch or another expert level distro for weird configurations rather than Mint/Ubuntu/etc. which are not as easy to modify that way.
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ck from Switzerland wrote on Aug 21st, 2023:
Thanks for the comment, Stephan. I think it is worth a shot :)
Stephan from wrote on Aug 21st, 2023:
There may be a solution for this which fixes speech-dispatcher without getting rid of it. While I haven't experienced crackling outside of spd-say, this AskUbuntu Q&A says that there's a bug in how speech-dispatcher talks to PulseAudio which can be worked around by switching to `AudioOutputMethod "libao"` in /etc/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf and, when I tried it, it seemed to work perfectly.
NordicNode from Scandinavia wrote on May 18th, 2023:
This is my third comment on this article. Haha.
I've been trying to solve this issue for so long, it have been driving me nuts!
I finally. FINALLY did manage to solve it in a "good way" instead of the "crappy MP3 solution" I posted below. :D
In short you should edit this file:
/etc/pulse/default.pa
Find the line with the text:
load-module module-suspend-on-idle
Comment it out by adding # in front of the line.
Save. Reboot. And enjoy the silence. :D
I wrote a more detailed guide, I hope it's OK to post the URL:
https://www.nordicnode.com/solved-stop-the-noise-static-sound-in-linux/
I really hope this will solve this issue for all of you with the same problem.
NordicNode from Scandinavia wrote on May 17th, 2023:
No, my last comment didn't solve it either.
I also tried to rename all pulseaudio folders and files that I could find so this crap wouldn't start but it didn't work either.
So here's my ridiculous "solution" to solve this problem.
I downloaded this MP3 file.
It's 1 hour and 20 minutes of silence. File size is 4.8 MB.
I now got this playing on repeat in Celluloid, that makes the static sound go away.
You can still play music/sound in other applications. I know it's a crap solution but I cant take the static sound any more.
NordicNode from Scandinavia wrote on May 17th, 2023:
I didn't even have speech-dispatcher installed on my PC that's running Linux Mint.
Every time audio starts to play from any application, the static noise stops.
When the audio has finished playing, the static noise comes back again.
I even tried to install speech-dispatcher. Make it say something and uninstalled it. It didn't work.
Ok... I think I just found a solution that worked for me. I just ran this command:
pulseaudio --k
It killed the pulseaudio process. The noise went away and the audio is working fine without pulseaudio running!
Now I just have to find out how to set pulseaudio to not auto start.
Anam Paiseanta from Galway Ireland wrote on Apr 8th, 2023:
Thank you so much for doing this research. I will save the command in case I need to apply this fix in the future!!
I copied and pasted this into a terminal: sudo apt-get remove speech-dispatcher.
After entering my password, I retried some audio files. The buzzing is gone. Hopefully for good.
Thanks again!
Arpad Attila Bakos from wrote on Mar 20th, 2023:
Than You! After removing speech-dispacher and reboot all the sound problems went away.
Misha from wrote on Nov 17th, 2022:
Yep, speech-dispacher is problem here on Linux Mint Cinnamon 20.3
Ending process solved problem many times, now I finaly removed package.
Thank you very much.
Roger J G Gamito from Brazil wrote on Aug 11th, 2022:
Important article, I also go through a similar problem, but does not have the Speech-Dispatcher package installed. At least, through instructions, I was able to do something to remove this annoying noise without having to get out of the program that runs the media.
Silviop from wrote on Aug 9th, 2022:
I use to restart pulseaudio, but i will give a chance (X470 motherboard).
Mikael from wrote on Jul 25th, 2022:
Thanks so much
It helped my computer I have been searching for an answer to this problem for a long time
Many thanks to you
Greetings from Sweden
Baltazar from wrote on May 31st, 2022:
This is still an issue and happens even on Intel boards. Anything that uses audio, whenever there are two or more instances of audio, playing or not (browser, game, anything), the audio craps out.
I have not found a solution...
With games is worse since this will have multiple audio tracks at once and this audio issue will just end up making the system/computer go mute.
Linux audio now sucks more than ever.
Claudio Kuenzler from Switzerland wrote on Feb 23rd, 2022:
Thanks José. Firefox was so far the idea because that is always the program which causes the audio crackling. But yes, there could be others. I will try the Pulseaudio restart as a workaround and will update here. Thanks for the hint.
And yes: I still experience the audio cracklings by the way after every boot.
José Ángel from wrote on Feb 23rd, 2022:
Sorry for write in spanish. I can read, more o less, in english, but is hard to me write it. I hope that your readeas can read spanish.
No tiene que ver con Firefox (también ocurre al lanzar Kontact mientras se reproduce audio). EL problema viene con PulseAudio. Como ese escritorio que usas me parece que no es muy mayoritario, yo recomendaría que sea en KDE, Gnome, Deepin, el que sea, los usuarios afectados lancen su gestor de procesos y finalicen al proceso "pulseaudio". PA se reiniciaría inmediatamente y una vez reinicien la aplicación que reproducía el audio, el sonido volverá a ser bueno.
Creo además que este fallo está presente sólo en arquitecturas AMD, y tiene ya varios años, pero no parece que nadie haya encontrado una solución :-(
Best regards.
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