Audio files sound high pitch when seeking in VLC?

Support & Help Requests
1

Hi everyone. I’m facing a little pesty problem with VLC on Ubuntu MATE 15.04.

For some reason, when I jump/seek an audio file in VLC, the playback goes a higher pitch. It’s not the first time this has happened, I think it has occurred a few years ago. On rare occasions, sometimes I’m lucky and the file plays as normal with no changes in pitch.

No other player has this problem. It pretty much happens to any type of audio file: OGG, MP3…

This is the output when playing a file, then seeking:

[00000000017b2f88] pulse audio output warning: starting late (-4364 us)
[00000000017b2f88] core audio output warning: playback too late (85900): up-sampling

Does this happen to anyone else? Even better if there is a way to correct this. :smile:

Thank you in advance!

2

After a little test with VLC’s settings, the culprit is no other than PulseAudio. :disappointed: I had set VLC’s output module to ALSA audio output and selected my hardware: HD-Audio Generic, ALC887-VD Analog Direct hardware device without any conversions.

VLC than plays the audio directly to the hardware, providing PulseAudio is not running (killall pulseaudio – Note that it auto respawns). There’s no problems using ALSA when seeking tracks, but then other programs cannot play sound (the role of PulseAudio). :frowning:

3

Strange. Other programs are supposed to be able to play sound with ALSA alone.
Pulseaudio is a proxy to kernel sound components like ALSA.
ALSA in many cases needs to be configued by conf files though.
I do audio recording in Mixbus/Ardour, so I just have JACK running on startup and
just route ALSA to it (snd-aloop), and sound for all programs work very well without Pulse.

4

What happens if you try this? Go to:

Tools -> Preferences -> All (radio button) -> Audio -> Audio Resampler and set it to Disable in the drop down box.

Does this prevent the audio resampling?

2 Likes
5

Thank you both for the replies. Kudos to @johnuren1980, disabling that option fixed audio sounding high pitch. :smile:

Under the hood, the terminal is outputs a lot of simliar messages (when using the -v switch):

[0000000001e0dfe8] core audio output warning: playback too late (89559): up-sampling

I’ll mark this as solved - There’s possibly something deeper into why this happens, or if it’s the type of on-board audio controller on the motherboard that has an issue with PulseAudio.