Annoying cracking noise on every song!

[JanMagnis]

Plan

Premium

Country

Norway

Device

Desktop (1060 3GB, i5 6400, 8 GB RAM, 64 bit)

Operating System

Windows 10 home 1809

My Question or Issue

Every song i listen to has some wierd cracking sounds every 5-10 seconds. I've tried to download from website and microsoft store.

[Sebasty]

Hey @JanMagnis 

Your audio crackling seems pretty regular. Could you try disabling your antivirus app for a moment and see if that cures anything? 🙂

Some AV apps may scan traffic and cause delays in audio stream, resulting in this sort of thing.

Also, make sure these are disabled -

The audio enhancements:
1. Go to Taskbar, find and click on the speaker icon. Click the speaker/device icon again on the volume slider popup.
2. Go to Sound Enhancement tab and disable them.
3. If there are additional tabs like Dolby or similar, try disabling these too.

The Communications setting:
1. Find the speaker icon on Taskbar again. Right-click on it and select Sounds.
2. In the opened window go to COmmunications and set Windows to do nothing.

Let me know how it goes 🙂

[JanMagnis]

I did all that, but it didn't help 😞 Ive tried several AUX ports aswell, but nothing works... I have also tried different headphones and apps (youtube, groove music etc.) but it works perfectly there

[kpwxx]

I had the same issue on my work PC.

After scouring these forums and some other places on Google, I found that switching to the default Windows audio drivers instead of the specific ones for my sound card reduced the issue a lot, though didn't get rid of it completely.

This will sound odd, but try opening the Windows Volume Mixer... does the cracking stop or greatly reduce when you have it open? Alternatively, try scrolling up and down your playlist/song list while in Spotify... does the cracking stop while you're scrolling. If so it's the same issue I had. I've ended up just leaving the Volume Mixer open all the time. It's a really bad hack but it works, and nothing else seemed to. It's a Spotify problem because no other audio has the issue on that PC, but the chance of them looking into it is slim to none.

[Kalibako]

EDIT: only worked for one day for some reason.

Read almost all the threads avaiable on this issue and tried almost all of them.

The thing that solved the issue for me was a post in "Premium - Crackling, Stuttering" thread, page 13, where one person solved it by updating all the drivers for the motherboard.

 Myself using a ASRock Z370M-ITX, went to their webpage and got all the latest drivers and the problem is now gone.

[Kalibako]

Seems like this just fixed the problem for the day, beacuse now its back again...

Guess ill have to do with having the sound mixer open while spotify is on.

[grfxguy53]

After spending far too many hours on this, I finally tracked it down to the NVidia HD sound drivers, which I wasn't even using. I disabled them in Device Manager and no more imitation vinyl crackling and popping.

[Novy]

Hey @grfxguy53, 

Thanks for your message.

We're glad to hear that you were able to sort this out. 

If anything else comes up, don't hesitate to ask in the Community 🙂

Take care.