Skype and VLC sounds sizzling, distorted, bad, crackling

It's not just a problem with Skype, I believe it's a problem with, you've guessed it, PulseAudio.

Workaround? Indeed there is.

Disabling PulseAudio's Glitch Free Audio seems to have solved the crackling for me (which became unbearable on Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 2)

To do this, edit the /etc/pulse/default.pa file in your favourite text editor.

Search for the following line:

load-module module-hal-detect

and append "tsched=0" to the end:

load-module module-hal-detect tsched=0

restart pulse (or just reboot your system), and the crackling should be gone.

Not sure what the side effects are by disabling Glitch Free Audio, but I can't seem to find any yet.

UPDATE: If you don't have a line with load-module module-hal-detect, then search for following line:

load-module module-udev-detect  

and append "tsched=0" to the end:

load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

restart pulse (or just reboot your system), and the crackling should be gone.

If you suspect that it's pulseaudio causing you the problems, there might be an easier fix for you. I posted an article with step by step directions on my blog on how to fix bad sound in Ubuntu. This is a fix for Wine, but since it's a modification of a pulseaudio configuration file, it might be applicable to other similar problems.