Crackling/distorted sound from MacBook Pro on macOS 26 Tahoe

Question

Level 1

15 points

Crackling/distorted sound from MacBook Pro on macOS 26 Tahoe

My MacBook Pro (M1 Pro) began having this crackling sound when playing music (Music.app) or video in Safari. This wasn't a thing before macOS 26, and this issue is definitely not a hardware issue (as another thread suggested), because:

It's not there if I have just Safari and some light apps open
When I open Xcode, the crackling can be noticed and it happens occasionally. Sometimes it doesn't trigger the crackling sound at all if I only have Xcode open but not running anything in a simulator.
If I run an app from Xcode in a simulator, the crackling becomes much more frequent

Definitely something the team wants to look into.

MacBook Pro 16″

Posted on Sep 21, 2025 9:45 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Tim Mitra

Level 1

64 points

Oct 13, 2025 7:19 AM in response to liut58

This might be related to coreAudio. This was an issue with previous versions of Xcode (16?). Restarting coreAudio would often fix the issue. In my experience, it happens when the Simulator is running. I started to notice the cracking since I updated to Tahoe 26.0.1. Out of habit, I quit Xcode and the Simulator when I record a podcast as well.

Apple did fix this in an update when this happened a few years ago. File a Feedback about it. https://feedbackassistant.apple.com

Generally, you can quit the Simulator, or restart your Mac. You can also follow the steps here to restart CoreAudio services.

To restart it:
Open Terminal (Applications > Utilities).
Type: sudo killall coreaudiod
Press Return, enter your password, and hit Return again.
This will force the Core Audio service to restart.

Source: https://www.simplymac.com/macbooks/how-to-fix-crackling-audio-on-a-macbook

Reply

Answer 2

Sep 21, 2025 9:48 AM in response to liut58

This is a user forum.

Bugs can be reported to Apple here:

Feedback - macOS - Apple

Reply