Since yesterday's update, I'm experiencing constant audio cracking when playing, every time a loud sound effect plays it seems to be followed by cracking, it's making it very difficult to enjoy the game.
I tried disabling all mods but the issue persists, same with BattleEye on or off.
I tried using different audio devices or Proton versions but I still encounter audio problems.
As instructed on discord I asked for as much information as possible, please provide the necessary information for us to reproduce the issue as I was not able to reproduce it on 2 machines
please create a ticket on https://feedback.arma3.com/ with as much info as possible. including rpt, exact proton version, Distro, PulseAudio or PipeWire? etc
I'm having the same problem on debian 13 with proton 10 and 11: there's a crackling sound during explosions and gunfire, and the AI voices on the radio sound distorted.
I can confirm that this issue exists for Arma3_x64 (2.22.153995) on Fedora 44 with Proton Experimental (11.0-1) and with Pipewire (1.6.8-1). The most relevant info related to audio in my rpt logs is the following:
I did not see any other relevant info in the logs like errors or other audio related messages.
There was no noticeable issue like this before the update so I looked through the changelog for update 2.22. I saw "Changed: Updated to XAudio 2.9". This lead me to suspect that XAudio 2.9 behaves strangely with the current wine/proton version for some reason. I also found some useful info on the Arma 3 wiki page that talks about solutions for crackling audio when using wine/proton.
I was able to make use of a partial workaround based on the info that I mentioned above. This workaround significantly reduced the crackling sounds that I was hearing, but it did not completely eliminate all crackling sounds. I used protontricks to do the following:
Launch protontricks and select the Arma 3 prefix
Select the default wineprefix
Select "Install a Windows DLL or component"
Scroll all the way down until you see xaudio29 and then select it and hit ok
Protontricks will install Microsoft's xaudio2_9.dll to your prefix's system32 and syswow64 folders and it will also set the dll override automatically
Close protontricks and launch the game
I tested the workaround by going into the eden editor to place down a player character next to a bunch of armored vehicles. I gave the vehicles a move waypoint and then I went into the mission to compare how much crackling sound there was. Before using protontricks as described in the steps above, the crackling was terrible and very distracting as soon as I spawned in. After using protontricks, it was much better although I could still hear a little bit of crackling as the vehicles gained some distance from the player character. I might have to play around with pipewire sample rates to eliminate all crackling noises, maybe to try 44.1 kHz, but I'm not sure about that yet.