Fixing sound in VLC

For some reason, perhaps a recent system update, VLC quit playing sound for videos with audio encoded as mp4a. After lots of internet searching, I found this solution, which worked for me:

"It works! Thank you! I forced strictness to -2 in FFMpeg options in advanced VLC options. It's under Tools>Preferences, then I click All under Show settings, click on Video codecs under Input / Codecs, then FFmpeg . So it's: Tools>Preferences>Video codecs>FFmpeg . Under FFmpeg I scroll down to under Encoding and I go to Strict standard compliance and I set it to -2 ."

I was pretty sure it was a VLC thing, since the same video plays just fine, with sound, in SMPlayer.