I have cards with audio files that should play immediately on showing the card, but often the first part of the audio is not played. Given these are vocabulary cards it means often I only hear half the word.
Are you using Bluetooth-connected speakers or headphones? If so, you might need to try one of the workarounds for the sleep/wake delay issue that affects some Bluetooth devices. Or, use a different output device (which could be a different brand of Bluetooth speakers/headphones). Please search the Anki forum for “bluetooth audio” to find previous discussion about and possible workarounds for the issue.
Thanks, after posting the forum suggested this thread to me: Beginning of Audio not playing on cards
A bit of testing show it’s indeed the bluetooth headset power saving. (This is on Ubuntu 24.04 BTW).
It would be nice if Anki could automatically take care of this issue for us, but I appreciate that could be tricky to get working reliably across all platform etc.