There have been a few times after installing Ubuntu or Linux Mint that when trying to listen to or watch anything with audio, a rather loud crackle/pop would happen. This pop would only happen after initially starting something with sound, or turning up/down the volume.
This popping is from the audio sound server called Pulse Audio. It is an integral part for all modern day Linux distros, along with some mobile devices too. It tells your audio to go to sleep after 10 seconds of no use. So when audio is started or adjusted, it pops just to let you know it's now awake.
It's kind of a good thing, as it lets you know Pulse Audio is working, but it's also quite annoying, and somewhat startling. To fix this audio hiccup is quite simple. We are going to navigate to the Pulse directory, use Nano (a default terminal editor in most Linux distros) to comment out the line that tells Pulse to sleep, save this change, and restart Pulse Audio.
Let's Begin...
1) Open a terminal and navigate to Pulse Audio's directory:
2) While in Pulse's directory, use Nano to open and edit the file default.pa:
3) With default.pa open in terminal, look for the line that says 'load-module module-suspend-on-idle'
4) Add a '#' in front of it to comment it out like so:
#load-module module-suspend-on-idle5) Now save using Ctrl+X, press Y to confirm the edit, and Enter to save the file name.
6) With the terminal still open, type cd and press Enter. This will bring you back to your Home directory.
7) With the terminal still open, restart Pulse Audio:
Let's Finish...
Finally, close the terminal and that's it.
You should now be pop and crackle free when starting or adjusting the volume of your audio.
I hope this helped someone from having the same audio issue I did.