Audio is silent or distorted

Output has no audio, or audio is clipping, distorted, or out of sync with video.

First, check the audio mixer's master meter and the per-strip meters in the Channel Strip Inspector. Silent strips with active inputs point to a routing problem; clipping master with quiet strips points to summing.

Common causes:

• Layer or strip muted. Walk every layer in the active scene and every strip in the mixer; an accidental mute on a single component kills downstream audio. Solo to confirm which strip is feeding the mix.
• Sample-rate mismatch. Composer's project default is 48 kHz; 44.1 kHz sources force per-tick resampling and can cause clicking or pitch artefacts on imported media. Pre-convert to 48 kHz.
• ASIO device contention. If another process holds the ASIO device, Composer's ASIO target can't open it (and vice versa). Close the other application; ASIO drivers are typically single-process.
• Channel mapping wrong. The MAPPING tab in the Channel Strip Inspector controls which physical channels feed the strip. A new project defaults to stereo; expanded 8-channel routing requires turning on 8-channel audio in Project Options first.
• Limiter pulling too hard. A limiter ceiling set very low (-12 dB or below) flattens dynamics and sounds distorted. Default is -0.1 dB; raise the ceiling before assuming the audio is broken.
• Web Page Input has no audio. The Web Page (Chromium, cross-platform) input doesn't capture audio from the page — it's a video-only source. Capture the page's audio separately (a virtual audio cable or a parallel RTMP / SDI feed of the same content) and mix it in the Composer audio mixer.

For per-operator coverage of the audio chain (Gate, Low-Cut, EQ, Compressor, Limiter), see the Audio category in the Operators manual.