Distorted / bad audio when playing mp3

[kimiraikkonen]

Hi all,
I can absolutely agree the complaints here:

viewtopic.php?f=14&t=98145

When i first installed VLC (since v1.1), i've been living with a suspicion as my hears are a bit sensitive than normal. Now i can confirm that i'm one of other victim of distorted / sizzled audio when playing audio such as MP3. Note that video files (some of them, such as AVCs) with audio also has bad audio quality.

To describe the effect, when the audio is being played, i get a bit sizzled / rustling audio WHEREAS Windows Media Player 12 plays them perfectly clean and crystialzed. The bad audio can first be noticed within first 10 seconds explictly, again, WMP is fine! My notebook has Realtek ALC269 chipset and based on my research it has nothing to do with current driver release of my audio chipset.

Disabling dolby in VLC prefereces did not help, i'm not using any special filters to effect audio. Everything is default even in my Realtek HD Audio manager.

Why does problem still exist in v2.0? I'm having same with 1.1 on Win7 also.

Thanks a lot.

Note: Where did mail notificiations go for topic subscriptions!??? I can only add topic to subscriptions but not getting an option to be notified by mail any more. What's more?

[kimiraikkonen]

Isn't there someone to explain the problem.

Further info, if i set audio output module from default to wave32 out, it really improves audio quality. But still confused why WMP plays with no problem.

Brand-new notebook with fresh VLC installation, really disappointed.

[redhawk]

It's hard to offer any suggestions when we cannot hear what the problem is without examples.
It could be a lot of things like poor up/down-sampling i.e. 44.1kHz <-> 48kHz, out of date DirectX / audio drivers.

What OS are you running??

What type of mp3 files are you playing?? i.e. bit rate sample rate e.g. 192kbps, 44.1kHz

A few things to try out:
Convert your mp3s back into WAV format and test with VLC again, use WinLame if you need a converter http://winlame.sourceforge.net/
Try an older versions of VLC like 1.1.11 or alternatives like Winamp just to rule out possible problems with VLC's decoder.
Try playing mp3s with different sample rates like 48kHz, 32KHz, and check for audio distortion.

Richard S.

[pinsal]

I had the same problem. Switched back to VLC 1.1.7, problem now gone.