Playback crackling solutions

If anyone has any solutions, please let me know. I've been using Musescore 4 for a while now and have been encountering the same issue of static-y crackling when composing. Either when putting notes on the staff or playing it back, I'm often met with jagged pauses and stutters which completely throw off the timing and make composing a complete hassle. I've looked it up and saw that many people had the same problem, and that editing their I/O preferences fixed it. I've done that to no avail. Switching to my highest buffer rate(4096) didn't change anything. My laptop(Hp Windows 10), seems to be running fine without any real trouble. When I upload a score, it sounds perfectly fine. But in the app, it's all distorted. Even when I updated to 4.1, the problem remained, while I've seen other people say how it's fixed for them. If any one has any advice on how to get my audio sounding normal again, please help. Thank you.