Beginning of Audio not playing on cards

Anki Help
1

On all my decks with sound files, the beginning of the sentence is cut off. So, for example, the sentence “According to the news report, three men were badly injured” sounds like “to the news report, three men were badly injured” or “How many employees does your company have?” sounds like “employees does your company have?”

I tried all the troubleshooting steps, i.e. changed the video driver, reset windows size, but nothing helped.

I tried creating a mpv.conf file and added these lines but that didn’t work.

audio-stream-silence=yes
audio-wait-open=2.0 (I started with the recommended value here of 0.3, then tried 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0 but nothing worked.)

I’m running Windows 11 and Anki Version ⁨25.09.2 (3890e12c)⁩.

Please advise how I can fix this problem.

Thanks!

2

This isn’t a solution, just a question. If the first recording on your card is a pause file, will this issue occur?

<p style="display: none;">[sound:_05s.mp3]</p> <!-- a short pause to work around a Bluetooth error -->

I used to set this up at the very beginning of the card, and I put the silent file _05s.mp3 or _1s.mp3 in my media folder and was able to use it somehow. The Bluetooth headphones were just a little glitchy at a distance, losing the signal, or something else that triggered them, maybe exiting power-saving mode and needing a short pause.

3

I created the silent mp3 file but I’m not sure where to put this line of HTML. Here’s what the card looks like:

image
image791×669 38.5 KB

4

If you paste it into the fields every time, it’ll be a pain. It needs to be inserted into the map design. Although you can also paste it into the fields, just insert it before the normal audio.

[sound:_05s.mp3] [sound:quizlet-10464884603-back.mp3]

However, there might be something interfering with your card design, if there’s some complex code there.

5

  1. Maybe try to play some audio file with low volume in the background, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPZkdNFkNps (“Rain Sound”) or GitHub - anars/blank-audio: Set of blank MP3 audio files

  2. Maybe try Sound Keeper v1.3.5 [2025/07/05] — VEG.BY

    Prevents SPDIF/HDMI/USB/Bluetooth digital audio playback devices from sleeping.

  3. Maybe try running the following code inside the debug console to create or overwrite the mpv.conf file if it exists and add 1 second delay to mpv (or put it into the mpv.conf file and restart Anki).

    https://docs.ankiweb.net/misc.html#debug-console

    To revert the changes, remove the `mpv.conf’ file in the Anki2 folder (https://docs.ankiweb.net/files.html#user-data and restart Anki.

    import os

from aqt.sound import mpvManager

with open(os.path.join(mw.pm.base, 'mpv.conf'), 'w') as f:
    f.write("""af-add=lavfi=[adelay=delays=1000:all=1]""")

# restart mpv to apply new settings
mpvManager.shutdown()
mpvManager.get_property('mpv-version')

  4. Maybe try updating mpv to the latest version, but it probably won’t help.

    Close Anki, download mpv from https://sourceforge.net/projects/mpv-player-windows/files/64bit/ and copy-replace mpv.exe to %LOCALAPPDATA%\AnkiProgramFiles\.venv\Lib\site-packages\anki_audio

  5. Maybe try installing VLC (https://www.videolan.org/vlc/) and this add-on https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/383102081 to play media files with VLC.

  6. Maybe try installing the latest audio driver from the official website and restart your PC.

  7. Maybe try installing the latest Windows updates.

6

Thank you!

Here are the results:

Playing the Rain Sound didn’t work.

Running Sound Keeper did work.

Adding the 1 second delay to mpv.conf also worked.

Updating the version of mpv.exe to the latest version didn’t work either.

I didn’t try the other suggestions.

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