I had same issue.

I've set periodsize to 1024 with nperiods 4 but sounds were delaid by almost a second, decreasing nperiods made it worse. I have them setup at 8 right now and it seems to be working ok so far.

[alsa]
periodsize=1024
nperiods=8

i want to thank the contributors to this thread my sanity has been restored i had a similar problem on Ubuntu 11:10 the config.ini modification has thus far solved the crackle noise..