Crackling sounds ??
Now The only reason I won't rant or blame the already lazy staff here and/or whoever makes the Musescore app stuff is bc I have no idea if this is me or y'all, so I'll be neutral about it...for now.
Now, I have lots of sH*tty crackling sounds on my orchestral stuff, and I will say no, I do not use TOO many MS sounds, bc I use my own custom-created soundfonts. The only MS sounds I use are the Sus. cymbal, SATB, and the Grand Piano. Now, after a lot of loud stuff happening during playback, it will start to stutter and glitch and crackle in its playback, and I have to close and reopen it to stop it, but it quickly will come back, and I don't know why. I have a pretty fast and reliable computer...MacOS Ventura from 2020 or something like that...I would hate to think it's me, but this is just annoying.
Comments
Generally, this is just a sign that MuseScore and your OS are not agreeing on your audio device's sample rate. Try changing it explicitly from 48 to 44.1 kHz (or vice versa) in your audio device or OS settings. Tends to happen more on Windows and Linux than macOS, so I don't know where to suggest you look to find those settings, but presumably they are there somewhere.
You can also try increasing the MuseScore buffer size in Preferences / I/O.