This is normally very good.

Currently on Ubuntu - I'm having playback crackling and intermittent sound cutout problems.

VLC Media Player is a Multi-Platform Media player that supports most Audio & Video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, MPEG-1, MP3, DVD, Ogg, AAC... and the list goes on) Its flexible, lightweight and best of all, VLC Media Player is 100% Free. VLC features a complete streaming server, with extended features like video on demand, on-the-fly transcoding, granular speed controls, frame-by-frame advancement and more. It can also be used as a server for unicast or multicast streams in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

Could it just be overloading due to too high a playback level?