Skype and VLC sounds sizzle/distorted/bad

It's not just a problem with Skype, I believe it's a problem with, you've guessed it, PulseAudio.

Workaround? Indeed there is.

Disabling PulseAudio's Glitch Free Audio seems to have solved the crackling for me (which became unbearable on Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 2)

To do this, edit the /etc/pulse/default.pa file in your favourite text editor.

Search for the following line:

load-module module-hal-detect

and append "tsched=0" to the end:

load-module module-hal-detect tsched=0

restart pulse (or just reboot your system), and the crackling should be gone.

Not sure what the side effects are by disabling Glitch Free Audio, but I can't seem to find any yet.

UPDATE: If you don't have a line with load-module module-hal-detect, then search for following line:

load-module module-udev-detect  

and append "tsched=0" to the end:

load-module module-udev-detect tsched=0

restart pulse (or just reboot your system), and the crackling should be gone.

If you suspect that it's pulseaudio causing you the problems, there might be an easier fix for you. I posted an article with step by step directions on my blog on how to fix bad sound in Ubuntu. This is a fix for Wine, but since it's a modification of a pulseaudio configuration file, it might be applicable to other similar problems.

The solution provided above by Robert worked for me. I had updgraded to 12.10 ubuntu and the new skype 4.0 upgrade had unusable sound (scratchy and distorted). editing per the instructions above and appending the following line to: load-module module-hal-detect tsched=0 in the /etc/pulse/default.pa file resolved the issue perfectly.

For awareness, the upgrade to 12.10 caused the recognition of my Soundblaster card to fail to be the default. For some reason it now defaulted to thinking my NVIDIA graphics card was the default sound card. Skype would initially make NO sound.
This can be corrected by following the directions in the Ubuntu forums post by billesboelle July 27, 2008. Here repeated for inclusiveness: I can't get Ubuntu to default select the pci card, after trying the settings from complete soundprob guide as below:
It seems the index=0 function doesn't want to help me. Maybe its due to the fact that my machine registres 2 sound drivers with same name ? cat /proc/asound/modules gives this response:

0 snd_hda_intel  
1 snd_hda_intel  
2 snd_cmipci  

Any ideas,or something you wanna see before being able to help me. Btw, forgot to mention. If i try the index option, my pci can is removed from aplay -l and cat /proc/asound/modules.

Configuring default soundcards / stopping multiple soundcards from switching Note: This section assumes that you have installed each soundcard properly.

In a shell, type

    cat /proc/asound/modules 

This will give the the name and index of each sound card you have currently. Make a note of the names, and decide which one you want to be the default card.

Now type

    sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

At the very end of the file, add the following (assuming you have 3 cards with module names A, B and C and you want to have them in the order CAB)

options snd-C index=0  
options snd-A index=1  
options snd-B index=2