Bad audio quality after rendering in After Effects CC 2018

[wlfhrd]

Hi! im currently having an issue with a bad audio quality in AE. the thing is that when i render a comp with a song i'd like to use, the quality just becomes so bad after i finish rendering it. it literally sounds as if it was duplicated 15 times (it's really loud and hurts my ears). i've tried many tips my friends gave me and the ones i found on other forums but none of them seem to work! i have no access to Adobe Media Encoder either. my render settings are H.264 and the audio settings are 48.000 kHz stereo. does anyone know how i can make the quality better? thank you!

[dj.summitt]

First question, did you alter the audio? Also, why not access to AME?

[wlfhrd]

yes, i added a bunch of audio effects over it but nothing else, also, i can't access to AME, there seems to be an issue with it when i try to open it (which i'll look up a solution for later). for now i'm really just looking for a way to render the audio in AE itself

[Rick Gerard]

You should not ever rely on AE for any significant audio processing. A little level control or minimal eq is about all you'll get. If the original audio is an MP3 you are asking for trouble. Monkeying with the default audio settings in the AME is also asking for trouble. Workflow details and screenshots of the modified properties of the audio layers (uu) would help us help you. Just saying you are having problems with audio does not give us any idea what your workflow looks like.

[defaultdjs2nqhm23g1]

Yeah, how dare the guy use software for the reason the software was created?  That's what I hate about Adobe forums- it's like the only people who respond are the ones purposely trying to be as unhelpful as possible.  It's a simple issue and a lot of people have it: After Effects outputs lousy audio.  If there's no way to fix it, fine, but let's stop pretending that maybe you'd have been able to help him if only he'd given you schematics of his project.  Here's a schematic for you: I have a high-quality stereo sound file.  When I render it out, it's mono, thin, and compressed to the point that it's unusable.

[Rick Gerard]

If you have a good audio source and you don't fiddle with the settings you get 48kHZ 16-bit PCM Stereo audio when rendering using the Adobe Media Encoder or the Render Queue. That is the broadcast standard. If you want something else, open up the rendered file in an application designed to create and render audio at a higher bit and sample rate.

If the audio is fouled up, it's a user error or low quality, highly compressed, or badly mixed audio source file in the composition, or you've fiddled with the audio controls and fouled things up.

After Effects is not a video editing app. Never was. It is not an audio app. Never was. It is designed specifically to handle visual effects and animations on a shot-by-shot basis. That is why it was created. Expecting it to do something other than what it was designed for is like driving nails with a screwdriver. You may eventually get the job done but it's not going to be pretty.