White noise in right audio

Please share a score showing this and give more details about your system

I have the exact same issue. Tried repairing with a new installation. Happens with any mcsz. Issue persists outside of musescore app but is triggered by musescore.

Can you try updating your sound drivers?

I'm on a windows machine. Do you recommend I use ASIO, MME, or windows directsound as the api? or is that not relevant?

Hard to say, every system is different. I haven't experienced this problem on any of my Windows systems, and I've used a whole bunch of different options here. So I'm guessing it really is about your actual device drivers.

I ask because I'm not sure which ones would actually work, I just looked at my devices through windows device manager and it seems like they're up to date, but maybe I need to use ASIO instead?

Unfortunately, I don't know which is best for your system. I'd just update all audio-related drivers.

I am having this issue as well. This seems to be a problem for the Realtek drivers automatically installed with Windows 10.

The only "workaround" I have found is to use an ASIO driver, however doing this does not allow for other audio from other sources to be played since ASIO (I use ASIO4all) only allows audio to play from one source (e.g. MuseScore plays but you can't hear audio from Google Chrome, a DAW, etc.), so I would not really call that a good workaround. Using MME --> Speakers (Realtek High Definition Audio) or MME --> Headphones (Realtek High Definition Audio) in the I/O preferences works when only using that specific output, however you have to manually change and reset the drivers when switching between output devices.

More Specifics on Reproducibility (I would imagine only for Windows): (In order for this to work, the driver in the I/O preferences must have already been selected as any preinstalled Windows driver that is not one I stated above or the device has to not be in correlation with the driver such as having headphones plugged in with "Speakers (Realtek High Definition Audio)" selected.) 1. Open another audio action (e.g. play a YouTube video in Google Chrome) --> 2. Open MuseScore (I'm using 3.6) --> 3. Complete Any Action Resulting in Playback (e.g. selecting a note) and a very loud white noise will occur from right speakers (be careful with your hearing if trying this with headphones it can really hurt).

To sum up the problem, Windows drivers and MuseScore only seem to work either with ASIO, which is inconvenient when multitasking, or correct usage of "Speakers (Realtek High Definition Audio)" or "Headphones (Realtek High Definition Audio)" in the I/O settings with a correlating devices being used. Though these work separately, it makes switching between headphones and speakers an absolute hassle. Any other selection produces the deafening white noise.

Hope what I'm saying makes sense... I'm certainly not a tech genius. Any further ways to fix this problem?

Just installed the program recently, immediately ran into this right channel noise issue at the first startup. All the drivers are up to date, the issue persists with any sound APIs and can't be fixed while MuseScore is opened. Tried different versions: 3.3.4.9134 from the Microsoft Store and 3.6.2.548021803 — the issue still persists.

Not new with 3.6, first reported with 3.0

It's most likely an incompatibility with your specific audio drivers and/or OS settings. Best to ask for help on the Support forum where hundreds of times more people will see it - and includes as much information as you can about the unique properties of your audio system (what brand of sound car,d which version of the device driver, what other audio programs are installed and potentially running, etc). Then someone may be able to suggest solutions that will work for you.

Had this exact same issue. All of my drivers were up to date. I did 'troubleshoot output devices' in System Settings < Sound, followed instructions on there and that immediately solved it.

That seems to ba a workaround

Your workaround really works at first, but when I opened musescore again, there's still noise. Then I found if 'Allows this device to use audio hardware acceleration' in the sound device's attribute is closed, the noise would disappear.