Comment 4 for bug 295519

I confirm this problem.

It's present when the pulseaudio process is running in the background. If I kill it (killall pulseaudio) then vlc audio is playing ok too. If I restart the pulseaudio process (e.g through Alt-F2) the glitches/distorsion returns.

Checking e.g the system login sound under System > Preferences > Sound is destorted as well. But some or more clicks on the arrow sometimes give a complete or almost complete sound. This to me indicate that sort of a priority, sync or buffer problem could be the cause. Vlc first tries to synchronize but after a few seconds it starts to throw away what comes in with no sound at all as a result.

I've tested Totem, Rhytmbox and MPlayer which plays ok.