Macbook pro 16" M1 pro 2021 popping sound OS 12.0.1

The fix for me after way too much troubleshooting:

• Had an intel audio driver from Microsoft Teams
• Had Chrome extensions in different Chrome profiles which were contributing - usually dark mode related
• USB mice - logitech. Had to switch to a mouse that uses a USB receiver

Still happens rarely under heavy load but I consider it fixed after a lot of work and unhappiness with my purchase.

MacBook Pro (16 , 2021)

MacOs Sonoma 14.5

What worked for my case :

1. Finder > Go > Macintosh HD > Library > Preferences > Audio
2. Delete the com.apple.audio.DeviceSettings.plist and com.apple.audio.SystemSettings.plist files
3. Empty trash
4. Restart your computer

after that you can test the speaker test and it will work perfectly at my end

@philosophy11, it's great to hear that the 12.4 update solved this for you!

Anyone else have success after updating to 12.4?

I'll try it later tonight, fingers crossed. This has been so frustrating.

Have the same issue with popping cracking sounds on my 14-inch MacBook Pro OS 12.4

After some Acitivity monitoring the issue seems to happen when Memory (not CPU) is moderatly loaded.

Below is the screenshot of when the memory pressure starting creating the sound.

The pops/cracking even appear when listing on AirPods Pro connected to the MacBook.

I spoke with Apple Support and they reccomended to send the Mac for repair, even though admitting that they don't know if the issue will be fixed.

Has anyone gave their MacBook away (for a week aparently) and had this succesfully fixed?

For what it's worth, I solved my issue. Loud popping and crackling noises occurred every time I was listening to Spotify. Youtube seemed fine whatsoever.

Now, I went to the settings section of Spotify and noticed the cache was sitting at 2.7GB. After clearing cache from inside the app settings, it seems to have stopped. I'm now 2 hours in and have yet to hear a pop.

Bonkers if you'd ask me..

Yeah, it's a shame. The problem still exists with brand new laptops also.

I have a 2017 Macbook Pro. After getting the battery changed by the apple service center I started hearing popping sounds. It has been almost a year since the battery replacement and I find the popping sound really annoying now.

I just discovered that if I am not charging the Macbook pro there is no popping. It is a temporary solution, but at least I don't get to hear the popping sound. So make sure to unplug the charging cable after the Macbook is charged.

Hope this helps others. I will also test it and see if I don't hear popping once the charging cable is removed.

If I start up Quicktime and open a new audio recording window...the popping disappears. As soon as I shut Quicktime down, the popping starts again.

I'm wondering if there might be some IRQ channel issues when the system isn't prepping for audio recording. Just spitballing because Apple Inc. seems to be pretty mum on the matter.

This has been happening to me now for about two months. Happens the most when I have at least three apps open at once, one usually being Apple Music, but I've heard the pops come from message notifications and during Facetime calls too. No update has fixed it and I tried the Audio MIDI change from 48,000 Hz to 44,100 Hz and it didn't work. Seems like that's maybe made fewer pops than before. At its worse, it was producing 5 loud pops every few seconds.

Same problem here (MacBook Pro, 16-inch, 2021, M1 Pro, 16GB RAM).

I've tried all the listed fixes (swapping bitrate in Audio Midi etc.) and it just keeps happening. Pretty disappointing for a device that cost $3,000 and is meant to have industry-leading audio quality for a laptop.

Curious as to whether this can be fixed via a software update or if it's a hardware problem. Whatever it is, I'd really like to see it rectified, especially as I had my laptop for a few months before noticing as most of the time I use external speakers, so now it's too late to return it.

Any suggestions for new things to try are welcome.

I did what dan1829 did and I've been able to stream Apple Music while working in InDesign and Photoshop at the same time with no popping for about 30 minutes so far. Just yesterday it was doing about 15 pops a minute. Hopefully this works long-term.

Same issue here, and it really surprised me. All aspects of this machine is great, the sound of the speakers is the best I've ever heard on a laptop, and then this stuff happens…

Chiming in to add to the evidence that – while this seems to worsen with CPU load – I have had several pops (and one is one too many!) with only a handful of apps open, such as a couple of text editors, a browser, and over 81% of resources available. When this first appeared, I had 63% available and audio could severely pop every 10-20 seconds. Which is inexcusable. I have never had this happen apart from manually switching / pushing the latency and I/O buffer in apps such as Ableton Live.

Closing nearly all apps seems to resolve the issue. But I have also simultaneously opened all the most complex apps (Logic, Ableton, Final Cut, the whole Office Suite, the whole Apple productivity suite (in the blink of an eye) with no pops, so it is not directly a CPU thing. Later I tried playing 3x 4k video streams. This produced no popping… for a minute. And then it suddenly pops. Both on Apple Music and Spotify. Sampling frequency was set to 44,1khz.

Really needs to be addressed.

The OS keeps creating these files which I think are the source of the issue, I could use some script to delete them on startup if found but I don't want to mess with it. Seems like the next version will come with the fix, but until then I'm gonna have to stay with the pops and breaks on the speaker ve tas always end up messing with my libraries

The question to the attentive Apple support team is, how many oblivion users just sent the laptop for service? And how much time are your employees spending on opening macs ;)

Since updating to Mac OS Monterey Version 12.3.1 (21E258) I haven't had any pops.

I also tried the previously mentioned suggestions (deleting files etc.) but those didn't seem to do the trick, only the update solved the issue.