This is a known bug. Occasionally something glitches and the sound breaks, causing the game sounds to play as pops. Your sound settings shouldn't make any difference on a computer that's less than 10 years old (channel and quality settings are only for VERY old computers that typically aren't even able to run the game).
Normally you can temporarily resolve the problem by restarting the game, but there is no way to prevent it from reoccuring. Unfortunately there's normally no error message or anything logged to help track down what causes the sound to break.
EDIT: You may want to contact the support for the music players you use. There may be a way they can help as your problems seems to come from having multiple sounds playing at once.
Normally playing music from another program in the background makes no difference (especially if you use proper players like iTunes or WinAmp), but I am not familiar with how Google or Spotify etc. play their music. They may be locked to specific sound channels that conflict with the channels Sims 4 use. Any modern DSP (the soundchip in your computer) has 255 sound channels and the programs are supposed to request channels that aren't in use.
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