Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

The audio in 3.5 was just played asynchronously, regardless of what was going on with the CPU emulation. While this caused things to get noticably out of sync sometimes, audio playback (especially background music, which more often than not doesn't matter if it's "out of sync", if that phrase can even be applied meaningfully) was otherwise pristine.

In 4.x the audio is garbage. All. The. Time. (Yes, even with OpenAL+SoundTouch. Well, actually, OpenAL is exactly as bad as Pulse, so...)

Please bring back decent audio as an option for those that prefer better overall experience over technical accuracy.

(This is one of three reasons why I can't enjoy playing games in 4.x the way I do in 3.5.)

One of the main goals of an emulator project is to increase the emulation accuracy as development progresses. Asynchronous audio had to go to fix other things, since allowing the emulator to do things that the real hardware cannot do is bound to cause errors. You can either continue to use an older and buggier version that runs better on your PC or upgrade to be able to run the newer versions that have better emulation, but it isn't the developers' responsibility to hold back development progress to cater to people with old computers. If they tried to do that, D3D9, x86, and DSound would still be supported, and the latest revisions wouldn't have all the features and speed improvements that would have been impossible if the developers had to use hackish workarounds to continue supporting outdated platforms.

No, it will not happen.

Deal with it, it breaks far more and has virtually no benefits compared to all the issues synchronous audio fixed. Get a faster system.. I have no issues on my first gen OC'd i7 so long as the game runs full speed and even dropping under full speed audio isn't that bad. Developers are not going to keep a hacky, broken or outright incorrect implementation to appease the few with toasters. It's not even possible as an option without breaking something and is just more bloat to maintain. It also has potential to interfere with fixing other issues down the road and is another reason why it won't be coming back ever.

The current implementation is the correct implementation and will remain that way.

You want desynchronous audio then give up support and stick with an older build and deal with all the other issues caused by desynchronous audio. There is a very good article written up about this so I suggest giving it a read. Also note you will be dealing with improper audio in games, no bgm or bgm that stops completely and a host of other issues.

From the sounds of things you are using Linux. My suggestion is to raise an issue report if something is wrong with audio, here on Windows 7 it works quite flawlessly with Xaudio2.

Not trying to be rude but that's how it is else some issues would never be fixed. For improvements to occur sometimes the more accurate implementation is the only way. As of recently I've only noticed improved performance and stability so it seems to be an issue with Dolphin on your system and OS providing your hardware is sufficient enough to handle the emulator. I wouldn't suggest anything less than an OC'd first gen desktop i7 or something else equal in performance. Developers shouldn't leave compatibility broken or re-break compatibility due to a few with issues trying to use the emulator on old hardware and outdated platforms, minimum and recommended specifications exist for a reason. You are not going to ask a game developer to break the game or make Crysis look like Minecraft just because your now ancient system can't handle it even on low settings, that would look rightfully silly of someone to request. Stability plus compatibility first and foremost then performance - only if performance doesn't come at the cost of breaking other things creating a bunch more issues and work for developers to sort through.

So as said either consider upgrading, overclock or raise an issue report. This is something that has been brought up numerous times before, exhaustively explained why it's necessary and why desynchronous audio won't be coming back.

If you want a broken emulator just use 2.0.

(09-06-2014, 01:48 PM)Aleron Ives Wrote: [ -> ]You can either continue to use an older and buggier version that runs better on your PC or upgrade to be able to run the newer versions

Upgrade to what? You intend to never support dolphin on less than an already-ultra-high-end CPU that's additionally been overclocked by at least 30%? Pending some major breakthrough, mainstream CPU's are not likely to see speeds much above the 3 GHz range (they sure haven't in some years now). Perhaps ever. I'm already above that and I barely get 50% VPS in a lot of cases. No currently plausible CPU is going to magically make that 100%.

(Using more cores might help... though I do realize that "console emulation" is a domain where this can be difficult to impossible. Unfortunately, modern progress in computer performance is in having more cores, not faster cores.)

In 3.5, it wasn't necessary; games can be quite playable around 50% - 70% VPU. In 4.x, that's only tolerable if you disable audio, because the audio in 4.x is actively irritating.

(09-06-2014, 02:15 PM)Xtreme2damax Wrote: [ -> ]No, it will not happen.

See, this is why I fear for Dolphin. 3.5 was great. Not perfect, but plays many games well, and is enjoyable. 4.x is unstable, has severe graphics glitches and having no audio at all would be an improvement over the current state.

(09-06-2014, 02:15 PM)Xtreme2damax Wrote: [ -> ]It breaks far more and has virtually no benefits compared to all the issues synchronous audio fixed.

Breaks what? I had one issue ever with async audio... out of sync cutscenes. It is, pedantically, noticably "wrong", but never "break" anything that I ever saw. The synchronous audio is utter garbage. I'm not sure what book you're working from, but "sounds great rather than like utter garbage" is one heck of a benefit in mine.

Oddly enough, I'm also missing audion in spots in 4.x where 3.5... well, in some spots even 3.5 had synchronous audio, which seem to correspond to where 4.x has none at all. (There's probably something to that as far as what it is that breaks 4.x entirely.)

(09-06-2014, 02:15 PM)Xtreme2damax Wrote: [ -> ]I have no issues on my first gen OC'd i7 so long as the game runs full speed

Unless your system is OC'd by more than 50% (to more than 5 GHz) or a few hundred MHz makes dolphin run 50% faster, I find it very hard to believe you can get 100% VPS. At times I'm lucky to get 40%. (In some games... in fairness there are a few games that do get 100% comfortably, but not the ones I'm most interested in playing.)

(09-06-2014, 02:15 PM)Xtreme2damax Wrote: [ -> ]You want desynchronous audio then give up support and stick with an older build and deal with all the other issues caused by desynchronous audio.

That's what I'm doing. Apparently it's what distributions are doing also (at least rpmfusion), probably because 4.x is simply an enormous setback in terms of stability and perceived quality.

The technical term you're looking for is asynchronous audio. Delroth and others spent a great deal of time getting audio to be synchronous in the first place, simply because it fixed games that had been broken almost for as long as Dolphin could run them. The truth of the matter is that asynchronous audio was responsible for numerous glitches that prevented many games from working as they should have. Delroth has expounded numerous times why asynchronous audio is gone and why it's never coming back. Please give this article a thorough read: http://blog.delroth.net/2013/07/why-dolp...rocessing/

The debate on this is pretty much settled. If you feel you can convince the developers otherwise, I advise you talk to them directly. As it is, those who cannot achieve 100% game speed (or fairly close to that number) should not expect perfect audio. If you are getting 100% game speed but getting bad audio, then it may actually be a valid issue, but if you're not getting 100% game speed, all bets are off. With sufficient hardware, Dolphin runs just fine, yes even on Linux. I'm currently underclocked to 2.3GHz, and most games run without issue.

I'm only keeping this open because there might be something up with your setup (at least that's what I suspect), so please provide instances of which games you have played, the game speed you can run them at, which Dolphin revision you're using, the audio issues you encounter, and the settings you're using.

Asynchronous audio is bad. I'll fully admit the time-stretching features in dolphin leave a lot to be desired, but going back 2 years into the shitty audio that made LLE audio necessary for like, half the games, and the other half still had broken audio. The solution is not bringing back broken audio, it's adding something like proper time-stretched audio to make the distortion less noticeable.

Case and Point: Before synchronous audio hit Zelda HLE (4.0-1300) we had: Music did not play in Mario Kart Double Dash, Zelda: The Wind Waker hanged /even more/ under HLE, Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 were not completeable under HLE audio due to hangs. Twilight Princess had a ton of hangs disappear overnight too!

You know what happened? People had to use LLE audio or not play the game at all. And that's just under zelda ucode games, which there are very few; but almost every game was positively affected.

Please, if you want broken audio that crashes all the time, but does legitimately sound better at low framerates please go play on 3.5. When the game crashes, or the audio ends up freezing, have fun with that.

(09-06-2014, 02:15 PM)Xtreme2damax Wrote: [ -> ]So as said either consider upgrading, overclock or raise an issue report. This is something that has been brought up numerous times before, exhaustively explained why it's necessary and why desynchronous audio won't be coming back.

Consider this an issue report (or remind me where I'm supposed to do that, if not here, as I seem to be missing issues on github?). Also, please consider the attached files and explain to me just how it is that 4.x is considered "better" than 3.5... thanks...

(Sorry for the tarballs; forum won't let me post the files directly.)

It's better because audio behaves totally wrong on 3.5, but perfectly in 4.0. Again, if you want a broken emulator just use 2.0.

What is "4.x" though? Git hash? Revision number at the least?

We still need to see what settings you used (screenshots preferably) and we need to know what speed the games were running at.