My audio is cooked - please help

[u/muddrox]

So I have a problem that has arrived at the worst time. I made a game on Reddit called Rock Bottom, and I have never had issues with audio until now. My audio, everything, sounds all staticy, and it's awful. For reference, please refer to the video link below:

https://youtube.com/shorts/9zdxO94XVeg

If you want to play the game and see if you are experiencing the static yourself, please feel free to do so by heading to this link:

https://www.reddit.com/r/RockBottomGame/s/82zczuEAdd

I have no idea why this is happening and why it's happening now. What's weirder is that no one on my game's subreddit seems to be reporting it (which is a relief), but I have to imagine some are being affected just as I am. When playing my game on either Android or Mac, my audio is awful and staticky.

I haven't made any updates to the game that affect the audio at all, and yet it's totally cooked on my mobile device. There is no reason, as far as I can tell, for this to be happening now. I don't even know what to say to provide any additional context for my issue, because I don't even know where to look.

My sound effects are uncompressed WAVs, and my music tracks (of which there are very few), whereas my music is compressed-streamed. One thing worth pointing out is that, when building my game, I do get noteworthy output at some point (shown below). This is something I have always had appear in the output from basically the beginning, and it never made any difference, so I don't know why it would be causing a problem now...

If anyone has any ideas or guidance they could lend me, it would be much appreciated. I am desperate to solve this as quickly as possible. Any help at all would be amazing. Thanks again.

Warning: Source audio file '/Users/[REDACTED]/GameMakerProjects/rock-bottom/sounds/Snd_char_chirp/Snd_char_chirp.wav' is malformed - forcing conversion
Converting Snd_char_chirp to Wav 16bit mono @ 44100Hz Warning: Source audio file '/Users/[REDACTED]/GameMakerProjects/rock-bottom/sounds/Snd_hop_off/Snd_hop_off.wav' is malformed - forcing conversion
Converting Snd_hop_off to Wav 16bit mono @ 44100Hz Warning: Source audio file '/Users/[REDACTED]/GameMakerProjects/rock-bottom/sounds/Snd_step/Snd_step.wav' is malformed - forcing conversion
Converting Snd_step to Wav 16bit mono @ 44100Hz Warning: Source audio file '/Users/[REDACTED]/GameMakerProjects/rock-bottom/sounds/Snd_wall_bounce/Snd_wall_bounce.wav' is malformed - forcing conversion
Converting Snd_wall_bounce to Wav 16bit mono @ 44100Hz

[u/muddrox]

Also! When I play my game via the test branch with Chrome Dev Tools open,

I see this garbage being spammed in the output:

game.js:1 Warning! - <unknown>(0) : Warning: Prevented call into an uninitialised yyal from Audio_EngineInvokeCallback

game.js:1 Warning! - <unknown>(0) : Warning: Prevented call into an uninitialised yyal from Audio_EngineInvokeCallback

game.js:1 Warning! - <unknown>(0) : Warning: Prevented call into an uninitialised yyal from Audio_EngineInvokeCallback

Again, this never made any difference or had any impact on my audio before, but now I don't know what is happening.

[u/Mushroomstick]

I have never had good luck with letting GameMaker convert audio assets and would recommend exporting all your audio assets at the desired settings directly from Audacity (or any other audio editor of your preference).