Fix Stuttering Audio in Kali Virtual Machine

Posted Oct 10, 2026

By PC Drills

1 min read

Introduction

Normally this should not happen but is usually caused by jittery drivers. In a VM this is most common because the device is emulated. you can usually fix this problem by giving more headroom in the alsa device ringbuffer. You need to edit the WirePlumber configuration as follows (since 0.5, the older 0.4 version uses lua scripts for configuration):

  
mkdir -p ~/.config/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d/
cd ~/.config/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d

Then make ~/.config/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d/50-alsa-config.conf in an editor and add:

monitor.alsa.rules = [
  {
    matches = [
      # This matches the value of the 'node.name' property of the node.
      {
        node.name = "~alsa_output.*"
      }
    ]
    actions = {
      # Apply all the desired node specific settings here.
      update-props = {
        api.alsa.period-size   = 1024
        api.alsa.headroom      = 8192
      }
    }
  }
]

Afterwards, restart everything via systemctl --user restart wireplumber pipewire pipewire-pulse

When running inside a VM, also disable the Firefox speech dispatch as explained here.