I am putting together a multimedia video slide show in After Effects. The problem I am having is with the audio after I burn it to DVD (Nero 7). The sound is fine from source to finished product, as exported with AE.

However, when I burn the project to DVD, some of the songs come out very strange. The sound seems to be… missing channels? Some of the music or lyrics are loud, some are very muted in the background and some are missing completely. They fade in and they fade out. It’s very disconcerting and very wrong.

I thought exporting the audio in mono would fix it, so I did that and then burned that audio in two channel AC3, which (only sort of) fixed the problem for some songs but not others. I’ve also tried converting in BeSweet and ffmpeg but to no avail. No matter what I’ve tried, I can’t seem to force all the channels into one nicely-behaving one, which plays all the music and lyrics at an equal volume (albeit without separation or depth). I’ve downloaded (though not yet tried) Avisynth, though I’m not sure it would help with this audio issue.

Strangely, the audio seems to be OK on my girlfriend's older DVD player but not mine. I’ve changed all the audio settings on my Toshiba TV (Cinema Series CRT flat screen ) and Toshiba DVD player but nothing seems to help.

Although I would much prefer to have my audio be in stereo, as it was in the project, I’d be happy if I could just have it playing predictably in mono. Any ideas on how I can get nice, clean stereo (or even mono) sound from where it is (in After Effects) to where it’s not (on my TV)?

Thanks!