SUPPORT REGARDING SOUND CRACKING

[BLACKSAMA]

Good Morning:

First of all, Hi all I am new here. I know is kinda annoying to have a new guy requesting support right away, sorry about that.

Anyway the problem I have is with sound, it cracks/slutter/lags after a some minutes of playing. Sometimes 30 minutes, sometimes 1 hour, sometimes 10 minutes, this happens with the only two game that I own, Arc Rise ( Before anyone mentions it, I disabled the V.A, and yes it sucks) and Rune Factory Frontier.

From what I have noticed on the FPS counter I can run both games at 100% of the speed, with some nice upgrade on the visuals, I believe my aging machine is still decent but yes, is getting old quickly.

However, both games, switch between ingame 30 fps and 60 fps, for example Arc Rise is @ 60 FPS on the item/equip menu and @ 30 FPS on the world map/ cities. I have noticed that the sound tends to crack after several of these switching 30-60-30 FPS, when I am in parts where the FPS remain stable at 30 FPS there is no issue whatsoever.

I have tried everything I have found on the forums to no avail:

• Disabling VBeam, seems to do nothing.
• Enabling VBeam and disabling idle skipping, not only disabling Idle is a MASSIVE performance hit (very noticeable), but it cracks anyway just take longer to take effect.
• Locking threads to Core does nothing as well.
• HLE, High Level Emulation has weird result but it indeed cracks faster.
• LLE, low level emulation runs also at full speed, it sounds ‘nicer’ and take a while more to crack but it cracks anyway and when it does it sounds absolutely horrible.
• I have also disabled Overclocking to default sppeds and used default Dolphin settings, same result.
  

I Was wondering if anyone has any advice that can give me. Thanks for the time reading this large post.

The versions that I have tried are:

• Official 3.5 Version
• Master Build 3.5-1385 (also several other versions of the master branch inbetween)
  

My Specs are:

• MotherBoard Asus P8Z77 V
• Core I7 2600 @ 4.2 GHZ With Hyper Evo (Switching to 3750k and Water cooling next month).
• 16 GB DDR3 @ 2400
• Nvidia GTX 460 ( Probably Switching to 660 TI or waiting for 700 series, undecided)
• Sound Motherboard integrated Realtek HD 8 CH
  

Thanks.


Blacksama


Edit: Something went wrong with the font...
Edit2: Adding format again.

[haddockd]

Welcome to the forums!
There are quite a few of us with this issue, but it tends to manifest itself differently for some people.

I only get the issue using LLE and it always takes right about 90 minutes to appear. Others have the same results as yourself. The devs are aware of it though.

Your theory about switching between 30 and 60 FPS was something I thought about as well. If I let my game just sit there on a world map for instance, I could never get the crackling to happen. I always had to actually play the game. Perhaps there is some merit in what you are postulating.

Anyone with more knowledge than me (which is most :p ) have any thoughts on this?

So far there is no official fix (that I know of) because no one can seem to narrow down exactly what the cause is. Shonumi did say that holding the tab key down for a few seconds tends to minimize the effect. I have not had an opportunity to try it out yet though.

[Shonumi]

On the latest revisions, try OpenAL as the audio backend. Increase the latency if you need to. Fwiw, Tales of Symphonia is the same (30 FPS in overworld/skits, 60 FPS everywhere else) and I can't get it to stutter when switching.

I do notice that Dolphin has some issues switching the FPS sometimes, e.g. I'll be in a city, watch a skit, and when trying to go from 30 FPS to 60 FPS, Dolphin seems to have a hard time figuring out what the FPS should be. Pressing Tab (temporarily disabling the framelimit) fixes this (as well as crackling audio after 90 minutes of gameplay, albeit, only for a short time). What is your framelimit? Try Auto, then try Audio if OpenAL doesn't do anything for you.

[haddockd]

Let me know if that works BLACKSAMA. I was unable to get OpenAL to resolve the issue (and the latency delay on it was awful, even when I set it to its lowest level).

[BLACKSAMA]

I did try OpenAL to no avail, but I did not touch the latency, since I had no idea what it meant/does, but now that you mention it and I did a mini search It was obvious to begin with /facepalm, I'm @ work ATM will try moving the latency on OpenAL once I reach home in 5-6 hours, thanks for your suggestion.

Framerate is Auto, I tried Audio and it did nothing regarding the issue (it actually lagged a tiny bit on Audio), I can not set it manually, because if I set it to 30 FPS the ingame sections @ 30 FPS will run at 15 FPS /sigh.

[Shonumi]

One other thing you can try is setting Limit by FPS. Technically, it's not as accurate when you turn it on, but it does help for some games.

[pauldacheez]

LLE plus two hours of play ends up doing this for me on Animal Crossing. It gets worse if I change the internal res or go into fullscreen.

[noname2323]

I also experience the same problem, for a period of playing the simulator keep repeat the sound from the other character... So weird... I try to open the game again then it seem to be alright.
Try to fix many ways but seem doesn't work. Hope on next version would fix this
According to what I notice then probably when the VPS turn to 45 then the sound start to clinching. Then it would become stable if I save or something. I currently play Rune Factory Frontier

[admin89]

Quote:Core I7 2600 @ 4.2 GHZ With Hyper Evo (Switching to 3750k and Water cooling next month).

For god sake , please keep your i7 2600 or upgrade to Haswell i5 4670k / i7 4770k + Asrock Z87 Pro 4 (115$) instead

[pauldacheez]

^ Agreed, upgrading from a 2600 to a 3570K isn't gonna get you much, unless that 2600 is somehow not overclockable, in which case you should go straight for Haswell stuff anyway.