Cut-off sound effects with OpenAL / Buzzing with FreeAudio
Posted: March 6th, 2014, 12:18 am
Hello forum! Long time no post.
This is getting unweildy with all the edits, so the short version:
With any of the OpenAL sound options selected, many of the sound effects in Book III get cut off far too early, and some "class" of sound effect (like casting spells or opening doors) tends to not play at all. Ambient sounds work fine, as does music, and things like footsteps (the soft crunching on grass, hard footsteps on wood, and squelching noises in swamps all sound totally fine). I've got a couple videos demonstrating this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llfMnDjC9KU and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLmofhJufxE
If I switch to any of the FreeAudio options, the sound effects all play properly, but there's a persistent "buzzing" noise which gets worse as the overall volume gets louder. The opening music sounds particularly bad, but it's always present. This seems to be different than the issue mentioned here - I don't have a pegged CPU, and any intermediate apps using sound don't affect it.
This is on a Fedora 19 x86_64 machine, using bare ALSA (no PulseAudio or similar daemons), and an "SB Live! EMU10k1" card.
The original post, and subsequent edits (the long version):
Anyway - I've finally got some time to actually play Book III now. I'm wondering if I'm missing some sound effects or something. I'm just at the very beginning still, and I've killed a few Bog Roaches with my Sparks spell, but the sound effects for both the spell and (possibly) hitting the Roach seem to be missing. Once or twice I heard a bit of a sound when I casted, but it didn't feel like a full sound effect. I *can* hear my footsteps perfectly well, and the squelching noise as I walk over the mucky swamp water areas.
I've posted a little video showing what I mean: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llfMnDjC9KU
Anyway, wondering if anyone else had run into that or not, and if so, if it's something specific to the Linux version.
Edit: Okay, after a few more Bog Roaches, I do seem to sometimes get at least a little bit of either the spell-cast or the "hit" sound, but they're both very truncated. Like I'm only getting the very first bit of the sound effect.
Edit edit: Okay, this does seem to happen on other sound effects in the game as well. Here's another video showing various doors opening and closing; I only get a partial sound effect on some of the attempts (though I swear I heard a full opening-door sound effect when I first went into Morwen's house) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLmofhJufxE - footsteps seem to be always fine, as does the ambient sound and music.
Edit edit edit: I didn't think to check before 'cause I figured OpenAL would be the only option on Linux. If I switch to FreeAudio, I do get all the sound effects as I should, though all the audio in the game then appears to have a persistent "buzzing" type noise which I think I saw mentioned elsewhere here, so I'll dig around for that. If I can get FreeAudio working without the buzzing then I'd be happy just using that, instead.
This is getting unweildy with all the edits, so the short version:
With any of the OpenAL sound options selected, many of the sound effects in Book III get cut off far too early, and some "class" of sound effect (like casting spells or opening doors) tends to not play at all. Ambient sounds work fine, as does music, and things like footsteps (the soft crunching on grass, hard footsteps on wood, and squelching noises in swamps all sound totally fine). I've got a couple videos demonstrating this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llfMnDjC9KU and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLmofhJufxE
If I switch to any of the FreeAudio options, the sound effects all play properly, but there's a persistent "buzzing" noise which gets worse as the overall volume gets louder. The opening music sounds particularly bad, but it's always present. This seems to be different than the issue mentioned here - I don't have a pegged CPU, and any intermediate apps using sound don't affect it.
This is on a Fedora 19 x86_64 machine, using bare ALSA (no PulseAudio or similar daemons), and an "SB Live! EMU10k1" card.
The original post, and subsequent edits (the long version):
Anyway - I've finally got some time to actually play Book III now. I'm wondering if I'm missing some sound effects or something. I'm just at the very beginning still, and I've killed a few Bog Roaches with my Sparks spell, but the sound effects for both the spell and (possibly) hitting the Roach seem to be missing. Once or twice I heard a bit of a sound when I casted, but it didn't feel like a full sound effect. I *can* hear my footsteps perfectly well, and the squelching noise as I walk over the mucky swamp water areas.
I've posted a little video showing what I mean: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llfMnDjC9KU
Anyway, wondering if anyone else had run into that or not, and if so, if it's something specific to the Linux version.
Edit: Okay, after a few more Bog Roaches, I do seem to sometimes get at least a little bit of either the spell-cast or the "hit" sound, but they're both very truncated. Like I'm only getting the very first bit of the sound effect.
Edit edit: Okay, this does seem to happen on other sound effects in the game as well. Here's another video showing various doors opening and closing; I only get a partial sound effect on some of the attempts (though I swear I heard a full opening-door sound effect when I first went into Morwen's house) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLmofhJufxE - footsteps seem to be always fine, as does the ambient sound and music.
Edit edit edit: I didn't think to check before 'cause I figured OpenAL would be the only option on Linux. If I switch to FreeAudio, I do get all the sound effects as I should, though all the audio in the game then appears to have a persistent "buzzing" type noise which I think I saw mentioned elsewhere here, so I'll dig around for that. If I can get FreeAudio working without the buzzing then I'd be happy just using that, instead.