---
title: "Audio crackling or stuttering in your emulator? Fix the buffer, sample rate, and exclusive-mode conflicts"
canonical_url: https://emudesk.com/issues/emulator-audio-crackling-stutter-latency-sample-rate-fix
content_locale: en
source_locale: en
entity_type: issue
index_status: index
published_at: 2026-08-31T18:22:23.000Z
updated_at: 2026-09-01T00:45:02.703Z
freshness_status: fresh
---

# Audio crackling or stuttering in your emulator? Fix the buffer, sample rate, and exclusive-mode conflicts

Crackling, popping, or stuttering emulator audio is almost always a buffer underrun or a sample-rate mismatch in the audio pipeline — not a broken ROM or emulator. The fix is usually to raise audio latency, match your output to 48 kHz, and clear exclusive-mode conflicts, in that order. Steps below.

The game runs, the picture is fine, but the sound is wrong: a steady crackle, periodic pops or clicks, or audio that stutters and goes out of sync with the action. This happens across emulators — RetroArch, Dolphin, PCSX2, DuckStation — and it almost never means the ROM or the emulator is broken. It's an audio pipeline problem: the emulator can't hand finished samples to your sound device fast enough, or it's handing them over in a format the device has to convert on the fly.

Cause: emulator audio works by filling a small buffer with sound samples and feeding it to the OS audio device at a steady rate. Crackle is the audible symptom of a buffer underrun — the buffer ran dry for an instant, so the device played silence (the click/pop) before the next chunk arrived. The four things that cause underruns are: (1) audio latency set too low for your system, so there's no slack when the CPU is briefly busy; (2) a sample-rate mismatch — the emulator outputs, say, 44.1 kHz while Windows runs the device at 48 kHz, forcing a real-time resample that drifts and clicks; (3) an exclusive-mode or format conflict, where another app or a Windows "enhancement" is fighting the emulator for the device; and (4) the host can't keep up — a power plan that downclocks the CPU, a bad audio driver, or the emulator simply running below full speed so audio and video both stutter together. The fixes below go in order of how often they're the cause.