The VideoLAN Forums

Hi there,

I noticed a weird bug a long time ago with VLC, when playing a mp3, or a video, or anything with sound, when I seek through the media file, sometimes the sound is slightly detuned ( I would say 1 semiton down, or perhaps less than a semiton down, it's probably unnoticable by many people ) then after a few seconds the sound is in tune. Weird isnt it ?

I had this with older versions of VLC , it seems it's still there with the last version I noticed it on almost every computers I used so far. Even with friend's computer

Anybody noticed this ?

Yeah I've noticed this as well from awhile ago and still in the nightly builds of VLC; I'll probably make a ticket about this.

OH MY GOD!

This happens to me too with all audio codecs I think, at least wav, mp3 and FLAC. It has happened on previous computers running WinXP and on my current computer running Win7. It has therefore been a problem for me the two past years. You can´t hear it good enough in proffesional songs, but in my songs created in LMMS studio I often only use 1 instrument or sound in the beginning and therefore it is highly recognizable.

It seems like the song are running too slow at the beginning, and then catches up after 3 seconds which means that the song goes up/detunes upwards just a tiny bit.

I guarantee that there is not a fault with my songs. Other songs made by others, also proffesionals, are also being detuned in the beginning. And my songs play just fine in other media players. Please contact if you need information

This is a damn serious problem... I can imagine people thinking VLC is the best media player (including me), and then it can´t even figure out how to play a song correctly.

After not finding anything on such a weird bug I thought I was alone but apparently no.
It happens shortly after seeking anywhere in the file. I started noticing it since 2.0.0 RC but it may happened before, though I notice it everytime now. It still occurs with 2.0.6 nightly (and with 2.1.0 the sound stutters too much anyway).
I tried on many different version of Windows (XP, 7 x86/64, 8 x64) and different soundcards (USB Headset, Soundmax HD thing, virtual ones like Virtual Audio Cable). I never noticed it on Ubuntu but it could happen too.

To better show it I recorded VLC's output when seeking to a song. I then played the output in VLC, seeked to 00:00 and recorded again. I have noticed different behaviors depending on the codec/format. It appears very strongly with OGG, a bit slowlier with MP3 and much less with FLAC.
Link to the extracts: http://r.symen.tk/wolf_bug.zip

This problem doesn't bother me much but I feel VLC doesn't deserve it.
Thanks for all the good work though.