Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

skid,

Changing the sample rate does not resolve the issue either. I have tried that with DSound and XAudio2.

I was not really able to repro it effectively on 2.0 because 2.0 wouldnt run any of my games long enough...lol

I still think we are talking about different issues. I started using Dolphin with 3.0-424 which had some HLE audio loop issues but no non stop random noise. After playing games like Zelda SS, SMG, Xenoblade and others for more than 200 hours with revisions between 3.0-424 and 3.0-750, I can be sure that the random noise did not occur in these revisions with HLE audio. The audio in these revisions has some rare soundloops that go away if you enter the next room or sometimes press the home button but not the extreme crackling that occurs (and stays) after around one hour of gameplay in recent revisions.

For me, using HLE and Xaudio2, the problem started somewhere after 3.5, I first experienced the problem at the time where OpenAL was implemented but cannot be 100% sure that revisions after 3.0-750 aren't affected because I did not play long enough with them.

The rare random HLE soundloops from earlier revisions are still there today (3.5-420), for example in Mario Kart Wii (1 of 16 races had a endless random shooting sound loop that did not go away until the race was finished. 15 of 16 races had no audio issues at all). But you need to play a very long time for the extreme crackling to occur, which I only experienced in NSMB Wii, Zelda SS and DKCR so far.

Correct. The extended play time crackling and desynching are the issue that most of us are experiencing. although some folks have complained of audio loops, I myself have never experienced that (however I do not use HLE so that may explain why).

Therefore we should always mention if me talk about the extended play time crackling and desynchronizing issue (1) or the looping issue (2). LLE users will likely never experience the looping, which occurs sometimes in HLE, even in 3.0 and older.

And we also need to distinguish between normal LLE or New HLE crackling caused by the game running too slow (3) and the new and massive extended play time crackling and desynching issue after around one hour of game play.

The extended play time crackling and desynchronizing issue also sometimes plays random sounds from other areas of the game, Mario starts talking nonsense in NSMB Wii or you hear over-pitched looping voices in Zelda SS. If not, than this might be issue number (4).

(1) Is the new bug that occurred somewhere after Dolphin 3.5 after playing for a longer time
(2) Is a bug of the old HLE and might get fixed with the new HLE, which is currently implemented for Gamecube only an in development for Wii, The bug is present in all old and new Dolphin revisions
(3) Is the normal result of missing asynchronous audio and slow emulation, only some kind of timestretch might be able to hide it a little. After completely removing the old HLE, this might become the Nr. 1 audio bug in Dolphin.
(4) might be the same as (2), I'm not sure

Random sounds and audio looping seem to be HLE specific.

The static actually happens the entire play time, it just comes and goes and gets stronger and stronger until it corrupts all of the audio (sometimes desynching occurs then as well). This happens with all backends, HLE and LLE

(03-11-2013, 05:09 AM)etking Wrote: [ -> ]Therefore we should always mention if me talk about the extended play time crackling and desynchronizing issue (1) or the looping issue (2). LLE users will likely never experience the looping, which occurs sometimes in HLE, even in 3.0 and older.

Might be caused by the Capcom Music Loop change?

3.0-793 = Last build before the Capcom Music Loop change

Can you confirm that 3.0-793 is the latest version to work without problem (1) above?

Issue number 1 and 3 seem to be described the same...you just mention a different version for each. What precisely is the difference?
I can confirm builds prior to 3.0 793 have the extended play time crackling and desynching. I am only confirming it with LLE though as that is all I ever use.

I hope to find some time to test 3.0-793 next weekend. The problem is that issue (1) sometimes takes a lot of time to reproduce.

@haddockd Issue (1) happens after a long time of gameplay and is exactly what you describe in post #178
Issue (3) happens instantly on slow emulation speeds and is not a real issue due to technical reasons. It can easily be reproduced by enabling LLE on a slow system. (example: play F-Zero GX) Since audio and video are always synchronized in LLE and new HLE, anytime the framerate goes down, you will hear crackling. Old HLE does not suffer from this because even if emulation runs at 50% speed, audio is asynchronous and therefore always runs at 100%. Some kind of workaround is the use of time stretch in OpenAL, but this sounds very distorted if the frame rate is not absolutely stable and constantly goes up and down a bit. This is why both LLE and OpenAL are completely unusable on slower PCs (including my Corei7-2670QM GT555M notebook) since audio will always be crackling and sound distorted.

Thank you. Then I can confirm this issue persists even pre-3.0. I was able to successfully get the issue on all builds I have tested to date (which is a substantial number). The earliest I can think of from the top of my head is 7719M. The crackling did occur in 2.0 but for the life of me I cant get it to run games long enough to reproduce the entire issue.

Just wanted to update the thread. I tried it with 3.5-1085 and the issue persists.