Bug report and workaround for cracking/popping sounds in JamesDSP on Hyprland (PipeWire)

[kaanreal]

I noticed that JamesDSP produces cracking or popping sounds whenever I open or switch windows in Hyprland.

While running JamesDSP in debug mode, I saw that the buffer size keeps changing every time the popping happens. Because of that, I tried setting the min and max buffer size in PipeWire to the same value — that already reduced the popping significantly.

However, the popping was still present when pausing or resuming playback.
To fix that completely, I created a dummy sink and routed its monitor output into the JamesDSP sink.
Here’s what I added to my launch arguments:

pactl load-module module-null-sink sink_name=dummy dsp_sink
pactl load-module module-loopback source=dummy.monitor sink=jamesdsp_sink

With this setup, the popping and cracking are completely gone.
It would be great if this behavior could be fixed upstream so that manual configuration isn’t necessary.