Question about async audio emulation.

[herpderpus]

I have noticed that in older versions of the emulator, for example 3.5 stable, sound doesn't break up when framerate drops below 100%, while in newer versions it happens all the time. A game where I notice this a lot is Kirby Epic Yarn, as soon as the emulation slows down even of a couple of frames below 60, the music starts to skip and pop like crazy, while on 3.5 the music plays normally even if the framerate drops.

I'd like to know if this is normal, and if there is any way to restore old behaviour in newer version of the emulator. Or maybe it was removed for accuracy reasons or something? If that's the case, I'd like to know what's the most recent revision that still plays audio asynchronous from the video.

Thanks in advance.

[DJBarry004]

That was removed during the HLE rewrite. And async audio was WAY buggier than sync audio (which is used now).

[herpderpus]

(01-24-2014, 06:35 AM)DJBarry004 Wrote: That was removed during the HLE rewrite. And async audio was WAY buggier than sync audio (which is used now).

That's too bad, async audio emulation is great, because you can fast forward the game and still hear the music normally, or not have those annoying cracks when the framerate drops a bit.

Anyway, there's no way to get audio emulation like that in newer versions of the emu?

Any plans to make it async again in the future?

[DJBarry004]

If it´s buggy, it would sound -stupid- (with no offense) to put that again. I have read a trick that help running the audio like if it was full speed. However, graphic lag won´t dissapear.

[mbc07]

This was discussed several times, and async audio sucked like a hell (in fact, it still sucks with Zelda uCode games running with DSP HLE). So, the long answer: if you don't have a computer capable of running Dolphin at full speed all time, the sound will stutter. If you're getting stuttering, your only choices is getting a faster computer or using OpenAL audio backend that provides timestretching (so, the sound will not stutter, even when running below 100%), however you'll get some audio latency.

If you're wondering why async audio was removed, you can read this article for more details.

And now the short answer: Async audio is inaccurate and buggy and will not come back.