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TIL you can beat the "crunchy" anime audio problem by using VLC's audio settings instead of new files
I kept having this issue where some older anime shows I was watching had this weird crunchy, distorted audio on certain scenes. I thought it was the files themselves so I spent like two days redownloading different versions of the same episodes from different sources. Nothing worked. Then I randomly decided to mess around in VLC's audio settings on a whim. I switched the audio output module from the default DirectX to WaveOut and adjusted the volume normalization to off. The crunchy sound just disappeared on every single episode. Now I check VLC settings before I go hunting for new files every time. Has anyone else fixed a weird audio issue with a simple settings change like that?
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hall.joel11h ago
Respectfully, I think it was probably placebo. VLC's audio settings rarely fix real distortion.
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Did you actually test it by switching back and forth during the same crunchy scene though? I've had similar issues with older encodes and found that toggling the audio settings in real time made the difference obvious. If you left VLC running and just flipped the output module mid-scene, you'd hear the crackle come back instantly. That's not placebo, that's the software actually processing the audio differently. What codec were those episodes using? AAC, MP3, or something older like Vorbis?
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tarabell10h ago
Gotta push back a bit on that, @lee847. Switching to WaveOut isn't fixing the crunch, it's just hiding it by bypassing VLC's actual audio processing. DirectX output usually handles modern codecs way better, and that crackle could be normal compression artifacts from old encodes that just sound rougher with normalization turned on. I ran into this with some 240p Vorbis files and WaveOut made them sound flat and muffled, but the crunch only seemed gone because the high frequencies were getting cut off, not actually fixed. Leaving the setting on DirectX and just tweaking the equalizer or turning off hardware decoding did more for clarity without killing the audio range.
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