Clicks and pops on my video's audio

Question

I'm using Shotcut to make a video for my song. It's just a still image and a simple audio visualisation. I'm planning to upload it to Youtube, and need the audio to be as high quality as possible.

I'm starting with the WAV file from the mastering guy, importing that in to Shotcut, and using the Youtube preset for exporting:

This seems to match the Youtube recommendations. The resulting MP4 file is about 46Mb (3 minute song).

However, when viewing the MP4 on my machine before upload, I'm hearing some clips and pops that are not present on the original WAV (which is really annoying given the long process I went through to get to this stage!).

Is there anything I can do about this, or is it something I must accept about compression?

I tried a higher bitrate but it didn't seem to make much difference and would presumably no longer be what Youtube recommends. I read somewhere that for best quality, giving Youtube a lossless audio format is actually better, but presumably YT will just compress it anyway. (And when selecting FLAC, I got a "Failed" message on export).