I get the audio crackle also, been trying to figure it out for a while. Some people seem to have solved it by disabling power saving on the audio card. Didn’t work for me but might work for you.

cat /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/powersave

If it returns a “1” then power save is active

Bitwig works nicely and has been winning over some Ableton users. Reaper has a Linux version and Ardour is a pretty popular Linux DAW

https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge

I’ve been meaning to give this a try but not got around to it yet.