Sound problems

[Rob(QG)]

I have had some problems with onboard sound since changing from a Geforce2 Ti to a Radeon 9600 Pro - not at all sure that was the cause of the problem, though.

Basically I am getting really bad reverb - Moto GP2 is really bad, as is anything written in Dark Basic.

Lots of sounds are missing from Vice City.

These problems happened after changing gfx card and both before and after I replaced my motherboard (745 Ultra -> K7S8XE+)

More annoying, though, is that UT2004 has just started to have sound problems - the sound will cut out frequently. eg - "Multi" 1-2 second pause "Kill" It's similar to how the Demo of UT2003 stuttered when playing online with lag, but this is offline as well. This only started happening yesterday.

I can't think of any changes I have made that could have caused these problems. I have disconnected the cd audio lead, the ac97 reverb controls were checked on the old motherboard, I have reinstalled the drivers on the new motherboard, tried all the different acceleration settings, tried all the different audio choices in UT2004, installed a newer version of openal - nothing seems to work.

Clean install of XP would be my next option, I guess, but before that does anyone have any suggestions of what I can try?

Need for Speed Underground and UT2003 sound perfect.

[Rob(QG)]

I've done some more poking around and Zoomplayer lists 4 possible audio output devices and lets me set whether Windows will use them or not.

They are:
C-Media Wave Device
Default DIrectSound Device
Default WaveOut Device
DirectSound: C-Media Wave Device (emulated)

If I set either the first or 3rd to be preferred, then this fixes one problem I had. It doesn't seem to be picked up in all games, though.

[omegaRED]

Um... Could you go to Control Panel>Sounds and Multimedia>Audio and select C-Media Wave Device in the 1st dropdown list (Playback, possibly also in Recording, tho if you dont record, then i guess it wont matter) and check the "Use only preffered devices" checkbox.
Also, run DxDiag and check the Sound Tab.

[Rob(QG)]

Looked in the Sound control panel and only C-Media is available in the drop-down. Choosing preferred devices made no difference.

In DXDiag it shows the sound device as the emulated one - with no way of changing it.

I appear to have some DX debug tools installed and that shows the same 4 devices as Zoomplayer showed me - but with no way of changing the default. The change I made in Zoomplayer fixed the problem only if DirectShow is involved - which it was in the quickest test I had.

So what it looks like I need to do is change the default for DirectX in general, not just DirectShow.

[Wombat]

What about your speaker setup? Is it set to SRS, or something?

[Faramir1966]

If been told that the debug version of DX may cause trouble when playing games.Dont know if this is really true,never used it.

[Rob(QG)]

Speakers are just plain bog standard PC speakers - no AC97 effects turned on.

I think the DirectX debug control panel is from way back - it seems to be DirectX 8 version. It's been a while since I did a clean format

Weird that the echoing problem only started with the gfx card change. Really at a loss as to why UT2004 has started mucking up - the only thing I changed prior to that happening was uninstalling ZA (I'm behind a router so it wasn't really needed).

[Wombat]

You changed motherboards on an install of XP? That won't work, I know from experience. One problem I had when I tried it was that my Audigy would act up.

[Rob(QG)]

Yeah - I wasn't convinced it would work, myself.

However the sound problem was there before I changed motherboard. The UT problem wasn't - but then that didn't go wrong until a couple of weeks after the swap, and it seems specific to 2004. 2003 works perfectly.

[Rob(QG)]

Hmm - I've done some googling and this issue seems to occur with DirectX 9.0b - with proper sound cards, too.

Someone had any sound card he tried showing as emulated - even though earlier DirectXs hadn't done that.

Someone changed CPU and fixed it that way.

Someone else formatted and fixed it.

I did reinstall DirectX after changing gfx cards - so maybe I went from 9a to 9b or something

[Wombat]

Have you tried uninstalling ALL sound devices, and rebooting?

[Rob(QG)]

Yep - just done all that, plus reinstalled a newer c-media driver - no joy with all that.

Then had another poke in the registry and wondered if these keys could be relevant (man this bit of the registry sucks for finding stuff):

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\MediaResources\DirectSound\Device Presence]
"VxD"=dword:00000000
"WDM"=dword:00000000
"Emulated"=dword:00000001

Put a 0 next to emulated and a 1 next to WDM - voila fully hardware buffered, non-emulated sound card enabled, without a reboot even.

Tested in DxDiag - hardware buffers working.
Tested in MotoGP2 - no echo/reverb.

Just off to test UT2K4.

[Rob(QG)]

Woot - it works. Game seems to run smoother, as well

Thanks for all the input.

I dunno how those settings got flipped in the first place - nor why reinstalling audio devices doesn't reset them, but at least it's fixed without a reinstall.