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.
Try playing around with different protons and try some protonGE’s.
Try some different launch options:
WINEDLLOVERIDES="xaudio2_9=n,b"There is different versions of xaudio i suggest 2_7 or 2_9. You can also look through winetricks for versions and make sure that one of the above are installed. Back up your wineprefix/steam_compatdata_game_folder before installing as its easier to do that uninstall things in wine.
PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60Here you can change pulseaudio latency. Try 30, 60 or 90 to see if one of those help.
Lastly you can fiddle with settings in winecfg. Change audio controller or enable EAX in the staging tab.
On my steamdeck i have lots of games that crackle and my tricks above do nothing to help. They have helped in the past on my laptop so your milage may vary.
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
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.
I’m guessing ‘WINEDLLOVERIDES’ should be ‘WINEDLLOVERRIDES’. Though it could be same misspelling situation as with the ‘Referer’ header in HTTP.
Also took me a while to read it as something other than ‘wined lover dies’.
You are absolutely correct about WINEDLLOVERRIDES. Had to look it up, twice.
Thank you!
I didnt really think it would be a proton issue but I guess it only really does it with cs. I haven’t noticed.othwr applications crackling or going mute.
Does that use pipewire-pulse while you are using pipewire? That occasionally has weird issues.
Try launching Pavucontrol and see if it has similar issues.
I think so. I am a little confused how yo see what audio driver is being used. When I run system ctl pipewire status it says its active. But im not sure if pulse also is. Ill checkout pavucontrol.
It really seems like an audio buffer issue in cs2. I notice it almost always happens at the restart of a match or if a lot of different sounds happen at once. The fix ive been using is to switch out of cs every time it happens, go to my sound setting, and switch the input from headphone to some other output , and then back to headphone. Then it’ll work for another few minutes until it starts crackling and then goes mute again.
Discord works fine in the background while this happens. Never loses audio.
One thing that happens in my laptop that I’d recommend checking is what happens if you lower the volume until you find a threshold you can listen well to but that hopefully doesn’t have crackling noise issues. In mine, the microphone is so sensitive anything over some 10~15% volume picks machine noise I’d normally not listen to. Otherwise, at the limit of the treshold my voice comes out clean when picked up by the microphone.
Oh sorry if I wasn’t clear, my mic has no issues, is the audio output that shuts off but only from the game.
It should be I asking sorry, as I didn’t make it quite clear. I could tell it wasn’t the mic, and meant that a similar issue could be happening, noise coming as interference and becoming noticeable as volume is higher.
