Fix for UTM crackling audio- thought it may help others

Hello everyone, I recently started UTM instead of Virtualbox to run Ubuntu 25.04 Plucky puffin ARM64 version on an M1 Pro Macbook Pro with 16GB of Ram.

I was very impressed how fast Ubuntu runs on UTM, and was going to use it as my main way to use Linux apart from one problem- all audio crackled when viewing content such as youtube.

I thought it was a sample rate mismatch issue, so was trying to figure out how to change the sample rate in Ubuntu itself, until I remembered the Audio midi setup on MacOS which I have used for my production and sound engineering background.

I checked, and I was set at 44,100 Hz, instead of 48,000 Hz, as soon as I changed to 48,000 Hz the crackling went away, and I can use Ubuntu fully now as I intend too.

I thought this might help some people if they are trying to run Ubuntu on apple silicon, it is a very simple fix and hope it helps someone else.

@conanthewarrior Welcome to Ubuntu Discourse :slight_smile:

Thanks for sharing this information with the community!

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Thanks for the welcome :slight_smile:

I am completely new to Linux/Ubuntu- I tried a distro about 12 years ago and just couldn’t figure it out.

Not now, with Ubuntu it is very simple to use, I managed to set up GUFW using the terminal commands to install it, and it was just the audio issue that stopped me using it as my main OS.

Now I found the fix, and I hope it does help other people too, I am confident in using Linux as my main OS, apart from music production- I will stick to Logic for that on MacOS as I am a professional and need to work with what I know well when working with clients.

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