Whats wrong with DSound and XAudio2?

[makotech222]

I'm on version 1975, and with all of my games, if I use Dsound or Xaudio2, all voices ingame are much higher pitch. OpenAL doesn't have this problem, but the latency on it is terrible. Anything over 5 is ~1second on latency, anything below is very crackly. Is anyone else getting this?

[JMC47]

I considered closing this thread for lack of information, but, I'm honestly curious. What game are you suffering this issue from? What is your framerate? Why isn't your profile filled out? How do you expect me to help you without knowing what game you're using?

[makotech222]

Sorry should've said that. It's on all of my games so far. RE:0, Rune Factory TOD,Super Smash Brawl, Xenoblade.


I just tested some more. It seems to be linked to my framerate set in general config. If i set it to limit to audio, it works fine. If i set it to something like 80, it gets higher pitch. Sounds like the timestretching is working improperly.

[JMC47]

I think you should be using auto framerate when possible. Audio can be a bit unstable. And yeah, it makes sense that the pitch gets higher when the framerate goes up; that's the intended side-effect, instead of just having it get garbled.

[Link_to_the_past]

I'm on version 1975, and with all of my games, if I use Dsound or Xaudio2, all voices ingame are much higher pitch. OpenAL doesn't have this problem, but the latency on it is terrible. Anything over 5 is ~1second on latency, anything below is very crackly. Is anyone else getting this?

Let me guess, you enforced 60 fps framelimit instead of leaving it to auto, correct? Not all games run at 60 fps, some run at 30 and some have variable framerate.

[makotech222]

Well this is some new behavior to me. Older versions didn't have this issue.

[JMC47]

Depends on how old of a build you are coming from. Much older builds (3.5) have awful HLE audio emulation, but can play audio normally at any speed thanks to how broken it is.

[makotech222]

Is there any way to fix up OpenAL to prevent crackling and latency?

[mbc07]

This is the side effect to reduce latency in DSound/XAudio2. Sometime ago, one of the developers (degasus I think) did some changes in Dolphin's audio mixer to reduce audio latency caused by DSound/XAudio2. To achieve that, time stretching were replaced by this new technique with doesn't increase latency but make the audio high or low pitched accordingly to the speed. In your case, you manually defined frame limit to a higher value, which resulted in high pitch (if you define it to 10, for example, the audio will have low pitch). To prevent that, just leave frame limiter as Auto and you won't get any problem...

Is there any way to fix up OpenAL to prevent crackling and latency?

As far as I know, no. The way time stretching feature from OpenAL works inevitably introduces latency and there's nothing to do to remedy this...


EDIT: yes, it was degasus, you can check the original thread here...

[makotech222]

Blah, i hate playing games at normal speed. I ended up reverting back to version 800ish.