Why does my meme sound click or change pitch when I export?
Almost always a sample-rate mismatch. Most meme audio is 44.1 kHz because it came from a music context; video timelines run at 48 kHz. The editor resamples on the fly, and the conversion can produce clicking at clip boundaries or a slight pitch shift — often only visible in the exported file, not during playback.
Hear it
The reason it survives playback and only appears on export is that real-time preview and final render use different resampling paths in most editing software. Preview prioritises speed; export prioritises quality, and the two do not always agree at clip boundaries.
The fix is to use audio that is already at your timeline rate rather than relying on conversion. For Premiere and Resolve that means 48 kHz. For CapCut it means 44.1 kHz — CapCut is mobile-first and works at 44.1, and forcing 48 kHz there causes the same problem in reverse.
That is why the download presets here are named after destinations rather than formats. The correct sample rate is different depending on where the file is going, and getting it wrong is invisible until the export.
Commonly called
People search for this under a lot of different names — all of these find it here: