Comment 123 for bug 301755

I understand a fix seems to already be in the works, and maybe I'll try again when Karmic is released, but I wanted to add that when getting this crackling, pulseaudio cpu usage goes through the roof (a detail I didn't see mentioned).
On my eeepc 900, playing openarena, pulse audio would occassionally spike to ~50% cpu utilization and would cause the crackling to occur. Obviously, thee eeepc has limited resources, but I would experience similar (maybe even worse) problems on my Dual AMD64 6000+ box. "sudo apt-get remove -purge pulseaudio" is a much easier fix than any of the above hacks IMHO. Unfortunately this removes ubuntu-desktop also, but well... oh well.