So, I'm an audio engineer that's big into lossless audio, mostly in .FLAC format. I've been having a major issue with VLC for the past few months (or longer, a few months ago is only when I really started to notice it), where a lot of my files contain digital clipping, but only in certain frequency ranges. It seemed to primarily affect the mid-high and high frequency ranges, so for example, the high registers of a piano, or electric guitar solos, and other stuff in those frequency ranges. The best way to describe it in layman's terms would be a "crackling" sound, similar to turning up the volume on an old clock radio to the point of distortion. Yes, I made sure VLC's volume was set well below 100% (as you can go much higher than that in VLC for some strange reason).
Playing a converted .MP3 of the same file inside of VLC didn't produce the same distortion, nor did converting it into Apple Lossless and playing it inside of iTunes, but converting the file to Apple Lossless or .WAV and playing it inside of VLC did. Something was obviously up with how my VLC installation handled lossless files, so I uninstalled VLC, trashed all preference files, and started from scratch. A clean installation of VLC also produced the same distortion, so it was something that is a factory default setting. I tried this on both my 2013 Mac Pro and 2012 MacBook Pro, each with the default on-board sound as well as using a Universal Audio Apollo Twin Duo interface as the DAC.
I spent months trying to figure it out. I played with every advanced setting you could imagine inside of VLC...cache, buffer, codec, you name it. Absolutely nothing helped. Then, I stumbled onto a Mac app called Vox, which is a free media player. Suddenly, the distortion was gone, and not only that, but my files somehow sounded a bit cleaner.
It's my professional opinion that VLC is not handling lossless audio files well. I don't know what kind of processing it is doing, or if it's handling the codecs differently than everything else on the market, or what...but clearly, something is wrong on the application level, and has been for some time. Googling the problem found numerous forum posts from both Mac and Windows users, going back years about this problem.
Just thought I'd mention this, since VLC seems to still be the Internet's go-to media player. You can get Vox here:http://coppertino.com/vox/mac
Playing a converted .MP3 of the same file inside of VLC didn't produce the same distortion, nor did converting it into Apple Lossless and playing it inside of iTunes, but converting the file to Apple Lossless or .WAV and playing it inside of VLC did. Something was obviously up with how my VLC installation handled lossless files, so I uninstalled VLC, trashed all preference files, and started from scratch. A clean installation of VLC also produced the same distortion, so it was something that is a factory default setting. I tried this on both my 2013 Mac Pro and 2012 MacBook Pro, each with the default on-board sound as well as using a Universal Audio Apollo Twin Duo interface as the DAC.
I spent months trying to figure it out. I played with every advanced setting you could imagine inside of VLC...cache, buffer, codec, you name it. Absolutely nothing helped. Then, I stumbled onto a Mac app called Vox, which is a free media player. Suddenly, the distortion was gone, and not only that, but my files somehow sounded a bit cleaner.
It's my professional opinion that VLC is not handling lossless audio files well. I don't know what kind of processing it is doing, or if it's handling the codecs differently than everything else on the market, or what...but clearly, something is wrong on the application level, and has been for some time. Googling the problem found numerous forum posts from both Mac and Windows users, going back years about this problem.
Just thought I'd mention this, since VLC seems to still be the Internet's go-to media player. You can get Vox here:http://coppertino.com/vox/mac
