Solved Heavy distortion of MP3 files with audacity 3.1.3

Recently audio/audacity has started to seriously distort MP3 files. The distortion makes speech sound rather like Darth Vader from Star Wars. There's a couple of short sample files at https://milibyte.co.uk/audio/,
output.mp3 is an example of the distorted sound when playing data imported from input.mp3. Similar distortion occurs when exporting any sound track as a MP3 file.

This only affects MP3 files , I have no problem processing .WAV or .M4A files.

I've tried rebooting into some of my older boot environments and it looks like the problem must have started sometime between 7th and 17h May 2022. The current version of audacity (3.1.3) has been in use since well before then so I'm assuming that the problem lies with some recently upgraded dependency but how do I identify it?

I'm asking here rather than in the audacity forum because this issue appears to specific to the FreeBSD port. I don't have any problems using the same MP3 files with audacity 3.1.3 on Windows.
 
You might be hit by https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=264442
Either apply the patch provided or build Audacity without libmad as ffmpeg should work just fine
Thanks, that certainly looks like the cause of my problem.

I tried rebuilding audacity without libmad but ran into problems building one of the dependencies. Rather than risking getting out of my depth fixing that I've resorted to a temporary quick and dirty workaround to keep me going until libmad gets fixed. I've uninstalled libmad-0.16.0 and replaced it with a copy of libmad-0.15.1b_7 from an earlier boot environment. After adding a suitable line to /etc/libmap.conf audacity appears to be working OK and nothing else appears to be suffering. Yes, I know I might end up with other problems but if so I can revert to libmad-0.16.0
 
Back
Top