I am having the funniest issue! Somewhat recently, I have been having my audio crackle and randomly stop, but ONLY in Counter Strike 2 itself. discord (yes i have to use it as all my friends do and wont change) and background applications keep sound going fine, until I unplug and replug my headphones to get sound back in CS. Then It goes for about another 10 minutes until I have to do it again. It feels like its sometimes triggered by a certain gun or grenade sound, and i hear some fizzing and crackling before it happens. No other program does this.

Very weird. I believe I have pulse audio installed. I am not sure how to check if pipewire installed over top of it or what (i read maybe pulse is the issue?) I tried verifying game files which did not help.

Linux mint, newest stable kernel (i forget which)

Any help appreciated…I know linux doesn’t have the best audio situation.

  • bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    It is seeming more like a buffer issue, so maybe the latency adjust will help. I notice it’ll do a crackle here and there, then goes mute.

    I dont get why it only affects the game though, and why changing audio outputs to something else and back again always fixes it temporarily. Or unplugging and replugging my headphones works too.

    Its a very similar sound to when you have your buffer too low in a DAW with a lot of plugins going.

    I have read some people say use discord in a browser but thays kind of annoying. I only have this issue in cs2, no other game

    • Maiq@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      You might be right about latency. Gaming on linux has come a long way over the years but it still has some bugs.

      Years ago FO4 would crackle, sometimes wouldn’t have dialogue and if you were anywhere near a mini nuke explosion it sounded like your speakers blew out right before you lost audio completely. The fix back then was to compile faudio which was not super simple to do. If i remember right it was problems in wine with processing WMA files.

      Wine evolves pretty fast and sometimes there are regression bugs that pop up from time to time and get sorted out in one if the next versions.

      Sometimes the problems fix is in a legal gray/black area which i think was the case with faidio fix i mentioned above.

      Sometimes it’s an update to pulsaudio or pipewire that break’s things which might be the case with my steamdeck. Online people have said that the crackling started after a steamOS update and was fine before then and a temporary fix is to restart pulseaudio.

      What I have learned over my 10+ years of gaming on linux is it always gets better eventually.