Usually crackling is buffer underruns. The sound hardware exhausts the buffered sound before the software can fill the buffer again.

Larger buffer or less stuff slowing down whatever’s filling the buffer. I’m typing this with one hand while I eat pizza, but give me a few minutes and I’ll give you some suggestions.

EDIT: Okay, took me a few hours instead of a few minutes.

The PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC reference in another comment is a way to increase buffer size at the Pulseaudio level if the program in question is’re using pulseaudio (probably yes, as I think that WINE always goes through PulseAudio today).

You can set this persistently and systemwide for PulseAudio in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf with the default-fragments and default-fragment-size-msec.

For PipeWire, the newer system, you can set this at a per-user level using pw-metadata like so:

https://wiki.debian.org/PipeWire

choppy audio on systems with high load

PipeWire’s lower latency compared to PulseAudio can lead to choppy audio on systems with high load.

First view the quantum using the pw-top command and then increase the quantum value using this command, until the audio becomes smoother.

pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.force-quantum 2048

Once you find the right quantum value for your situation, you can make the value permanent by creating a config file ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/choppy-under-load.conf with the following content and restart pipewire related daemons.

context.properties = {
   default.clock.quantum = 2048
   default.clock.min-quantum = 2048
}

I don’t know how the two typically interact today, unfortunately — most Linux audio systems to date have had some form of emulation of each other, which somewhat complicates matters. When I play back audio from mpv today using the PipeWire audio output plugin, I see a stream both in pavucontrol, which is PulseAudio’s mixer, and in pw-top, which is a PipeWire tool. Same thing happened with all of PulseAudio and ALSA and with ALSA and OSS in the past.