sound comes out VERY distorted
 

Hi,
I am currently using Linux Mint 13 maya 64 bit. When I boot into Mint, the login sound comes out fine. But immediately after, if I play a song using VLC, it comes out VERY distorted. I have to restart VLC a couple of times, seek through the song and only then the distortion stops and sound comes out fine. It remains good till the next boot when I have to do this again. Please note that everything was fine when I was using Archlinux 64 bit before.

My initial guess would be that your system is at the edge of use for Mint. Arch is noted to be a lightweight distro.

I guess you could post specs for a better idea.

I have seen this on a few machines and if I remember rightly you go into the sound preferences in VLC and change the soundcard from pulseaudio to alsa. Sorry about the vague details as I've not got VLC on this machine but you may find that works.

Might be that vlc is the issue. The latest vlc has had some posts on similar issues.