What causes audio crackling in Unity?

The audio thread is starved or overloaded — too small a DSP buffer, too many simultaneous voices, or main-thread hitches blocking audio — producing dropouts heard as crackle and pops.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix Audio Crackling and Pops in Unity

Quick answer: Increase the DSP Buffer Size to Best Latency or Good Latency, cap the number of concurrent voices, and fix main-thread stutter so the audio thread is not starved.

Crackling audio is almost never the audio files — it is the audio thread not getting the time or buffer it needs. A few project settings and voice limits clear it up. Here is what to change.

How to fix it

1. Raise the DSP buffer size

In Project Settings, Audio, set DSP Buffer Size to Good or Best Latency (a larger buffer). A buffer that is too small underruns on slower devices, and underruns are what you hear as crackle.

2. Limit simultaneous voices

Too many AudioSources playing at once overruns the mixer. Lower Max Real Voices, use voice stealing, and avoid retriggering the same loud sound dozens of times in a frame.

3. Fix main-thread hitches

A long frame can stall audio buffering and cause a pop. The GC and load stutters that hurt frame rate also hurt audio; reducing those removes the correlated crackle.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every Unity error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

Ship the fix, watch the signature disappear from the next build. That's how you know it's really gone.