[Trivial Psychic]

Howdy All:

A few of you may recall my posting of an... issue I was having with my PC.  After upgrading most of my core hardware during the summer, I switched to using the on-board sound (which I was told had more features than my SL-Live! Value).  Unfortunately, I started getting an annoying sound problem.  During particularly intensive situations (or on occasion, not so intensive ones) all sounds get replaced with loud buzzing noises.  Quitting and restarting Freespace will cause it to go away, but it won't prevent it from happening again.  After inquiring with the community, the general concensus was that this was either due to the poor nature of the integrated sound, or the drivers, which haven't been updated in well over a year.  Lately, its become more and more persistant, to the point that I finally decided (last night) to buy a dedicated sound card, and so today I bought an SB-Audigy2 OEM.  I disabled the on-board audio, removed all drivers and software, then installed the new card, used the very latest drivers and tried out Freespace.  The first thing I noticed was that sound quality was better.  I then decided to test the game in a mission that buzzed-out my old audio without fail... Inferno - "Nemesis".  Unfortunately, and nearly the same point in the mission... "BBUUUZZZ". Now, I've also since installed and played several missions of TBP 3.0 and encountered no audio abnormalities.  Since changing hardware didn't resolve the problem, could there be something in my copy of FS2 that has become corrupt, and is causing all of these headaches that have plagued my attempts at Freespace gameplay?

Someone, please assist!

[MatthewPapa]

I used to have this problem as well. I am not what fixed it for sure after I upgraded but I can tell you it may be some of these,

Heat may be a problem
Your mobo may be cheap (get an asus!)
Try other speakers
If you have a realtek soundcard get rid of it because its crappy

[Flaser]

Where is your soundcard?

I used to have similar distortions too when it was placed next to my videocard. Reason? Electro-Magnetic Interference.
The powersource is also not so EM friendly - it may seem pointless, but try moving the card to a different slot. (Farther away from the other cards and the PS).

This interference could happen with an integrated card too.

The reason why (almost) only soundcards act in this manner is the presence of an analougue signal (the output or more likley the unamplified output) that's very sensitive compared to the digital data in other equipment.

[Unknown Target]

I think that it might be overheating or a cheap mobo. I'm not sure if happens with a sound card, but I have heard of this problem with integrated sound (overheating causes the wires to sometimes cross).

Also, are you sure (just checking) that you enabled your new card? Make sure that your computer and FS2 are actually using it, and not your oboard sound.

[castor]

Here's one site with some (possibly) helpful tips:
http://g33kflat.skankyflat.net/articles/soundcardfix.html

GL HF

[Trivial Psychic]

My MB is an ASUS A7V600-X (AthlonXP).  There are 2 empty slots between my video card and my audio card.  I removed the drivers and disabled the on-board audio in the BIOS before I even installed the new card, and I've got my audio plugged into the card's ports, not the on-board ports.  I'm not using speakers, I'm using headphones, and returning back to the destop clears the sound issue, which ONLY happens under Freespace, so I'm pretty sure its not related to my speakers.

[Steel]

Sorry folks, but most of that is just silly so far.

He has an Audigy 2 - said so in the first post...

That is a quality card.  Heat is not going to cause the traces to short on that - it is unlikely on any other sound card or mainboard either.  If heat is going to harm anything, it is the APU itself.  

Moving the card to a new slot is going to cause the card to be assigned a new IRQ, which may help.  EMI is not going to affect the card no matter what slot it is in or what it is next to.  Moving it may help keep the APU cooler if you have cards next to each other due to air flow between them (lack therof if next to each other - especially a fairly high end video card with active cooling being right next to the audio card).

He knows he is using the new card since he plugged his speakers/headphones into the new sound card.  One point made though is definitely ensure the onboard sound is disabled.

But it sounds like you have all that covered, TP.

Does it happen in ANY other missions?  If not, can you try getting the original mission data files off of the cd?  How about original sound data files?

Can you move the card one slot over to see if a new IRQ helps?

Make sure your case has a method to exhaust the hot/warm air.

Any chance you have another set of headphones, just on the odd chance?  It seems that might be the common piece of hardware (other than mainboard?).

I have also seen very weird things through the years, any chance on taking everything out of that case and testing it that way?

It does sound like an odd problem...

[phreak]

well you can always reformat and start from scratch and hope it works

[WMCoolmon]

I think there are copies of the original VPs on the FS2 CD. Grab these and replace the originals:

warble_fs2.vp (Music)
sparky_fs2.vp (Sound effects)
stu_fs2.vp (Voice acting, last resort)

You could also try setting SoundSampleRate or SoundSampleBits to something else:

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,24223.0.html

[Trivial Psychic]

I used "Nemesis" because that one used to konck out without fail while I used the on-board sound.  I haven't had the chance to try out many more missions since I got the new card, though I did give TBP a try, as mentioned in my top post, without incident.  As for the sounds, I used to experience this under intensive FS2 stock missions, especially the last few, but since Inferno uses almost exclusively new sounds, I doubt that the sound files themselves have become corrupt.  Its almost as though the method or internal software that processes the sound has become corrupt.  I'm gonna try something new the next time it happens.  I used to get some texture anomalies (resolved) but I could fix it temporarily if I alt-tab to the destop and then return.  I haven't tried alt-tab in a while, so it may still crash, and even if it doesn't, it may not restore proper sound anyway.

Oh, and I haven't tried this with a debug, since I haven't had any luck with debug builds.  They've crashed every time for me.

[Edit]WMCoolmon, after investigating your link, I have to state that the registry is unavailable to me.  If I click on the registry tab in the laucher, it comes up blank with an error message.  I can't remember exactly what the error message was.  This started up when I switched over to Taylor's build with the new pilot code.[/Edit]

Later!

[WMCoolmon]

Try the file in the zip, double-click to add the keys to your registry.

Or, if you're familiar with regedit, you can use it to find them in  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Volition\Freespace2

They're both DWORDs.

Disclaimer: Nothing should go wrong, I've tested this on my computer and it worked fine, but it's messing with the registry and you should be cautious about such.

[Vertigo1]

http://www.descent-freespace.com/tools/

Download a copy of VP View and go into the root vp and play all the sounds and see which ones give you the trouble you describe.  Make sure to note somewhere what file reproduces the error.  Then just extract the files from the same VP on your FS2 CD #2 into your main FS2 directory, and play the file to double-check to see if you still experience problems.  If not, then play FS2 and see if it still happens.

[operator]

Onboard sound = very bad for your health. Anyways you fail to mention whether or not you are having problems in other games with your newest sound card.

Another question you need to ask is if you've formatted at all during all this and whether or not it's consistent with your problems.

[Trivial Psychic]

I don't play too much else besides Freespace.  Besides, anything else I play, I play under my XP partition, rather than my Win98 partition, which I use almost exclusively for FS.  Also, the other games I play, didn't have any probs with my on-board card.  As for formatting, the last time I had to reformat was almost a year ago.  Long story:

My older system (pre-upgrade) used 30GB IBM drive, added 120GB WDC, moved most of my data to the 120GB.  IBM drive failed, installed OS (WinME) onto 120GB drive and played from there.  That OS failed a few months later, had my GF's kid brother split my drive into 2 partitions, one for my data and primary for the OS, which was now Win98SE that he gave me.  Had problems where FS ran too slow, eventually turned out he'd forgot to install AGP drivers, so my VC was behaving like a PCI card.  I added 'em back myself and got the performance back.  Then upgraded CPU, MB, VC, & RAM, switching to the on-board sound & LAN, and he added a 3rd partition for WinXP.  Unfortnately, he lost my data partition in the process.  Because of file allocation system, only XP can detect all partitions, but Win98SE partition can only detect itself.  Last format from Win98's point of view was back after my WinME failed.

I will give that new build you posted a try, Coolmon.  If that fails, more drastic action may be necessary.

Later!

[NGTM-1R]

As silly as it sounds...perhaps it isn't the card at all, but your speakers don't like a particular sound, or a particular set of sounds overlapping?

[Trivial Psychic]

Originally posted by Trivial Psychic
I'm not using speakers, I'm using headphones.

[WMCoolmon]

Well, you did try another set of headphones or speakers, right?

[phatosealpha]

Only specific missions?  By any chance, is one of them exodus?  I was playing through that one last night, and I swear there was a point where it just clicked over, and the sound quality dropped horribly and I got a very grating clicking sound on the end of most sound effects.

[Trivial Psychic]

I just finished trying an older set of headphones, your new special sound build (which has broken movie code BTW), and alt-tab.  With the latter, the sound continued as I was back on desktop, but when I returned to the game, I had just a continuous black screen, so alt-tab is broken still.  I experienced the BUZZ under all of these conditions, however once again, after a few hours of playing TBP, I experienced no audio anomalies.  Since TBP is its own separate install, I am gonna try the 2nd-last ditch recovery attempt... I'm gonna reinstall FS2.  I'm gonna install it into a new directory, patch it, and then start copying in the key files I've been using for SCP and my own custom-selected effects.  If this doesn't do the trick, I will be forced to resort to the last ditch recovery attempt, and do a cleansweep of my win98 partition, then reinstall everything.  It that doesn't work, I guess I'm just condemned to play nothin' but TBP from now on... not that that's such a bad thing though.

Later!

[Trivial Psychic]

Originally posted by phatosealpha
Only specific missions?  By any chance, is one of them exodus?  I was playing through that one last night, and I swear there was a point where it just clicked over, and the sound quality dropped horribly and I got a very grating clicking sound on the end of most sound effects.

I've encountered this in Inferno, STL, Homesick, FS2 main campaign, and even some of the Port.  Its usually triggered by intensive activity, beams, flak, etc., but its becoming easier to trigger all the time.  Also, its not just a drop in sound quality or some iritating clicking sound, all my sounds go from normal to this loud BUZZZ like a fire alarm or something.  On rare occasions, I hit the escape key (to pause it) when it happens (which I do everytime so I can reach for the volume nob to turn it down) and the sound will return to normal.  If I resume the game, sometimes it'll continue like normal and not have any problems, sometimes it'll just happen again later in the mission, and sometimes it'll come back as soon as I resume the game.  Sometimes quitting the game and returnng to the flightdeck will stop the buzzz, but the ambient sounds and music of the flight deck will be gone.