It can happen, but it’s quite rare. For example, it happened yesterday, but it faded a few seconds after waking from sleep.

Sometimes, after waking, it no longer detects the Wi-Fi network until the next restart, but that’s rare as well.

For me it happens every time I put it to sleep and I exit the game and go back in and its fixed for a bit then audio will go completely off and thrn come back crackling, so I have to restart thr steam deck to get it completely working but its annoying need to completed reboot every time

And it looks like its now even happening even if i dont put it in sleep mode!??!?!

Hey MÖNØ, I’ve just noticed the same issue as you while trying another game, Shadow Tactics. It doesn’t only happen after sleep mode.

Whenever it occurs, I notice the audio cuts out completely for about 5 seconds. The sound then comes back, but with crackling, and it stays that way until the next game launch.

It seems to happen only with certain games. For example, while playing Desperados III, I never experienced this exact same issue, but since I started playing Shadow Tactics, it sometimes appears after about an hour of gameplay.

My impression is that some audio service crashes, and the crackling starts after it restarts.

I’m using a Steam Deck OLED 1TB, Proton Experimental, and the stable Steam channel.

There are many fixes for the crackling or choppy sound. No need to do them all. Try one by one:
- turn off Steam Recording
- turn off/mute mic
- lower the ingame volume
- in the performance tab, turn off overlay
- try the Decky Plugin "Pause Games", which helps with the resume crackling sound (it's in the decky store) https://github.com/wynn1212/SDH-PauseGames
- turn off WiFi Power Management (settings/developer)
- reboot. Can be just a temporary bug even after a recent reboot. This will restart Pipewire which sometimes fixes it. Or try this command when it happens. Maybe make a bash script and add it to steam and run it when needed. If it works of course: systemctl --user restart pipewire pipewire-pulse wireplumber
- when docked, turning off HDMI CEC on steam deck fixes audio cut outs
- try to reset to 60 fps. Some games may not like lower fps caps
- SimpleDeckyTCP Decky Plugin has a resume feature to use max TDP on resume which also helps with crackling sound


Per game fix:
- turn off in game properties, general Overlay (I would also try in the performance tab, turn off overlay)
- try another Proton (Experimental or GE_Proton). I think GE-Proton has Xaudio29 which also helps
- add this launch command, you can tweak the value between 0 and 100: PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30 %command%

Some games (especially older ones) don't suspend/unsuspend well. The theory that was going on a few years ago was the when unsuspending the game, the game would try to use resources before they were ready. What some owners did for those games is use a Decky plugin to "Pause" the game. Then suspend it in their Deck. When they unsuspended their Deck, the game was still "Pause" not trying to use anything. They would then unpause it and keep playing without audio issues.

Worth taking a look at:

https://github.com/popsUlfr/SDH-PauseGames

Originally posted by Mahjik:

Some games (especially older ones) don't suspend/unsuspend well. The theory that was going on a few years ago was the when unsuspending the game, the game would try to use resources before they were ready. What some owners did for those games is use a Decky plugin to "Pause" the game. Then suspend it in their Deck. When they unsuspended their Deck, the game was still "Pause" not trying to use anything. They would then unpause it and keep playing without audio issues.

Worth taking a look at:

https://github.com/popsUlfr/SDH-PauseGames

That is the old repo. You should use this one which has more recent updates https://github.com/wynn1212/SDH-PauseGames

Originally posted by ★ Danceman ★:

Originally posted by Mahjik:

Some games (especially older ones) don't suspend/unsuspend well. The theory that was going on a few years ago was the when unsuspending the game, the game would try to use resources before they were ready. What some owners did for those games is use a Decky plugin to "Pause" the game. Then suspend it in their Deck. When they unsuspended their Deck, the game was still "Pause" not trying to use anything. They would then unpause it and keep playing without audio issues.

Worth taking a look at:

https://github.com/popsUlfr/SDH-PauseGames

That is the old repo. You should use this one which has more recent updates https://github.com/wynn1212/SDH-PauseGames

To be fair, I'd expect anyone to grab it through Decky which will always point to the current repo.

This has nothing to do with sleep. Read again #3 and #4 and don’t add up noise if you have nothing interesting to add.