After upgrading VLC I discovered that it was unable to play mp3 or any kind of audio. After a second or so the sound would pause for a moment. I tried to use the equalizer, decrease the VLC native volume below 100%, disable time stretching audio, disable high quality audio resampling… nothing would make the problem disappear.

I started to think about downgrading to a previous version, and then I tried one more solution — that worked!

At the audio settings of VLC > Output modules I changed Win32wave to DirectX. With DirectX VLC audio worked without problems, but I suspect that other users might need to do the reverse, i.e., from DirectX to go to Wave output. In any case it seems to be a problem related with particular audio output options you may need to change, even temporarily.

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