Comment 24 for bug 347544

Same deal over here on a brand-spanking new Dell Inspiron 1545 running Jaunty - The crackling is terrible, particularly at high volume and, as others have mentioned, during Pidgin join / part audio notifications. Oddly enough, it also seems to happen from time to time when I mute the audio, too.

Opening Sound Preferences and switching everything to ALSA helped for the most part, but then I'm back to dealing with certain applications "stealing" the soundcard and not giving it back up when other apps want to use it.