FLAC playback broken since yesterday (pops/audio dropouts)

[The Bright Side]

Hello, folks! Yesterday, VLC started dropping the audio at the beginning of multichannel (4.0, 4.1, 5.1, 7.1) FLAC files. In 9/10 cases, there's a split-second audio dropout during the first second of any song.

This started happening after I ran BleachBit on my computer. I tried completely purging and reinstalling VLC to no avail. Playback module is Pulse. I can't use ALSA, since the channel assignments are all messed up (center coming from rear left etc.).

No other media player has this issue. I tried Parole, Quod Libet, SMPlayer, Xplayer.

Any help would be truly greatly appreciated. Any info/logs I can provide?

[The Bright Side]

I may have fixed this. I made thew following changes in the VLC Preferences:

Video: disable video
All > Input > Audio codecs: disable compression for A/52 and DCA
All > Audio:
* Disable Peak protection, time-stretching, force detection of Dolby Surround
* Enable Force S/PDIF, Remember audio volume
* Audio desync compensation: 0
All > Audio > Audio resampler: Disable
All > Audio > Output modules: set Media role to "Music"

Also, in Pavucontrol, I added a 20,00 ms latency to the output device.

So far, no more dropouts. But it's a little early to tell. I'll listen to more music over the next few days and see if it's fine now. Fingers crossed.