vlc mp3 sound quality

When playing mp3s, vlc is very scratchy/coarse sounding, on any volume except nearly muted. The hardware/system volume can be all the way up (and at this point, needs to be), but vlc's volume control must be nearly all the way to the left to avoid the "speaker at its limit" distortion sound.

Has anyone else encountered this problem, and hopefully came up with a solution? Barring a fix, could you recommend me a good minimalist-interface audio player (in the vein of foobar2000 for XP)?

Thanks.

 

Is this through the speaker or through headphones?

 

same problem here... speakers

 

got the same problem...with speakers

same thing happens with some mms streams as well, not just mp3s. any ideas besides using equalizer to minimize this problem?

 

How about turning on the "normalize" option in VLC? That is what I did to minimize the scratchy noise I get, before I was able to update the audio drivers.

 

I sort-of assumed that the problem was just that the built-in speakers were rubbish. Is that not so? Is this some sort of software problem?

 

This happens through both speaker and headphones, but only when vlc's volume slider is up any, regardless of speaker volume (fn+uparrow), leading me to beleive the problem is with vlc, not the speakers.

I'll try the equalizer thing, though I'm sure that'll have its own side-effects. Thanks for the tip. Or could you link or walkthrough the audio driver update, marauder?

 

Yes, same problem here. Both music and video sound. On content which sounds fine in media master, I get this sctrachiing at anything but minumum volume with livna VLC.

 

Try setting the sound volume to max in media master.
Then quit media master and start VLC.

Does this solve the problem ?

 

my workaround:

ctrl+G to open vlc equalizer
under equalizer tab, uncheck 2pass
under audio tab check volume normalization and slide maximum level bar to the middle
that should solve the problem, though sound's still dull. my personal preference to correct sound is to set the equalizer under audio menu to "ska", master volume on netbook to 60% and vlc volume to middle.

voila! enjoy your music...

 

My Work around

I followed this thread,

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=383&p=10080&hilit=update+mplayer#p10080

And updated mPlayer. Its easy once you have VLC already installed. Also installed the front end SMPLayer, and sound is perfect.

 

Re: vlc mp3 sound quality (FIXED for me)

I've tried all of the suggestions upthread here but .AVI sound was still distorted. I was playing with the volume slider in VLC to set a base level, and discovered that sliding it all the way left 'muted' the sound altogether. Sliding it right turned the sound back on, and all distortion had disappeared, perfect sound. This works every time now, when I watch a new .avi, and seems to be a fix, for me at least.

Keith

AA0 110 Linpus