Audio-Quality Getting Destroyed... I think.

[Habanc]

So, welp, I finished a song, and so then I went ahead to run it through After Effects.

So, I did all that, waited 20 minutes for it to render, then gave it a quick test-listen.

For reference, here is the song:
http://soundcloud.com/habanc/watch-the-world-turn

It seemed to crackle and pop quite a bit once going through a rendering. I wasn't sure if it was clipping or something, so I went back into FL Studio and made a few small adjustments to give a tad of headroom, re-rendered it from there into .wav format, then slapped it back into After Effects and rendered it again on higher audio settings.

Still crackling, especially when you hear the tail wobble on the bass in the beginning.

So, then I dusted off the Pinnacle Videospin and tried using that. It still crackled, even when I previewed it from inside the program. Double-checking I went back and listened to the raw .wav file, and there was none of that. Hell, the .mp3 I uploaded onto soundcloud doesn't either.

Now that I think about it, it sounded like the cracklings you get in FL Studio if you have a low buffer length (or something like that). But that doesn't make much sense since I test-listened to these videos with no other programs running.

But anyways, this has me stumped. Is it just clipping for some odd reason, and I need to tone it down a bit? I dunno, I'm not a huge tech genius so I'm not sure if video creators have their own parameters for audio space.

[Navron]

Double check your audio settings to make sure your sample rate of the movie is the same rate as your audio file. Perhaps they are set differently, and the video program is attempting to down/upscale your song's audio sample rate.

[Mundius]

Render it in wave and 512-point sinc. Shouldn't crackle then, but it will take forever.

[Gray Ham]

That sometimes happens to me.
I killed off some programs (like Steam) that were running in the background and it sounded good again.

[Habanc]

I turned down the audio setting, I already render my songs in 512-point sinc as is, and I tried turning off steam and skype to no avail.

I put it up on youtube, unlisted, so you guys could hear and maybe help me better?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUA7hJlb2P4

[Navron]

Well I'd say one last thing you could do is render out the animation, open it in a simple movie editor (Pinnacle, Windows Movie Maker, etc), and add your audio separately.

Only downside is you'd have to manually line up the mp3 to the waveform.

[Versilaryan]

Render it in 16-bit and see what happens. Most movie editing programs don't like audio files with huge bit depth.

[Habanc]

Render it in 16-bit and see what happens. Most movie editing programs don't like audio files with huge bit depth.

Thank you. That partially solved my problem. I ended up just doing away with the animation in general, all it is is just pretty lights moving to music.

I just rendered it off videospin after that and viola! It worked.

Thank you all for your help!