Audio popping issue

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Originally Posted by Maeklos

The VAC did not stop the stuttering. It just turned it from audio garbage (extremely loud G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G) to muting effects. Basically, the VAC driver wasn't putting through the audio garbage, making it sound like someone was flicking the Mute button really quickly.

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That is what I have without buying their new audio codec, just quick fades in and out of everything. It is really horrible on all combos, as every step seems to make it worse.

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Originally Posted by MoonstalkerZ

My dad, a 40-year veteran of the programming industry, had several insights that I'd like to share here.

First, the community team's response of blaming user hardware may not be the opinion of the devs, or even of the individual community team members, but could be a result of orders from on high based on advice from lawyers. If SE delivered a non-functioning product, and the problem IS on their end, they could be liable for damages, depending on how the laws work in Japan. So though yes, the response sucks, we shouldn't be abusive to the community team - it's entirely possible they're just doing what the lawyers told them to, and being nasty isn't going to help them fix anything.

His second insight is about what the devs might have been dealing with when they were writing the new sound engine. If they were basing it around this third party system, they would have had to figure out how to work with an unfamiliar API, and there's a good chance they had to contort their programming around this API. Also, I could be wrong, but it doesn't look like Embody is a Japanese company, so if the documentation was only written in English and they didn't have any programmers fluent enough in English to understand the documentation, they'd need to get someone to translate first. Not only does that require someone who speaks both Japanese and English, but it requires a translator with programming knowledge in both languages. (Trust me, as a former amateur translator, googling stuff will only get you so far if you don't even understand the subject matter.) It's certainly not an excuse for the shoddy mess they pushed out at the last minute with no warning, but that's a programmer's opinion of what the devs' experience might have been.

Finally, he mentioned that their inability to reproduce the problem is a HUGE barrier to fixing it. He said that at this point, their best bet is to find someone who has the bug and flat out buy their computer (and pay for a replacement, of course - $2000 is nothing to SE).

So several takeaways from that.
1) Temper your expectations. They can't even reproduce the bug. It's not going to be fixed in two weeks unless they can immediately reproduce the bug.
2) I realize that means the game's going to be an awful experience for a long time. Go ahead and unsubscribe if you want, if enough people do it it'll put pressure on them to get it fixed quickly, but also don't feel bad if you don't unsubscribe - I plan on playing anyway, I still enjoy it enough that I'm not willing to give it up just to send a message.
3) I really do think they're trying. While the situation is extremely frustrating, even anger-inducing, writing abuse at the devs and the community team on the official forum isn't going to help any.
4) DO keep up the pressure, though. Keep talking about it, keep sending bug reports (DETAILED bug reports), keep tweeting. I understand we're all angry and frustrated, but do TRY not to be a total jerk about it.
5) I keep seeing people posting their hardware in here, bug symptoms and steps they've taken to fix it. Don't just post them in here, post bug reports as well. It's the bug reports that they're going to read.

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I posted my specs, they can reproduce it under 600 bucks even with a chip shortage, as everything I have was readily made and still in stock.

Main take-aways I have seen are with AMD processors and realtek audio drivers.

As far as my mobo from msi (the 970) this is the latest update to my realtek driver.

Realtek High Definition Audio Driver
Version
6.0.1.8010
Release Date
2017-02-07
File Size
357.68 MB

btw downloading from msi means it is already done, as opposed to that other method of 40kb a sec

I will install my mobo driver again, and report here if by some chance of haleion it makes the sound stop stuttering

restarted the pc twice, but now is the true test on if it works (also have siren log in ques)

ehh not too bad only 25, used to be 1900

I will que duty roulette and test the sound.

(only up to Stormblood so my testing will be limited)

so the stuttering is still there, seems wholly attached to combat only. Mainly aoe, but anything involving a 4 combo is also affected. *sigh*

The system seems to be bottlenecking itself with sounds from different sources. Instead of using compression it is just letting every sound fly one on the other overlapping till we get stuttering. Reminds me of when I first started using fruity loops, a sound program for music, I didn't know what compression was then and I just let everything play at the same volume and I got the same results as what is going on in this game. I would hope we didn't inherit some newfound audio mixer that doesn't know how to to use compressors.

(what's a compressor you ask? It is the filter that allows things to be heard despite overbearing harmonics, they are also known as crunchers with heavier music, the idea being when a sound frequency hits a certain range it is "compressed" or lowered to fall in line with the set maximum of the other volumes. It makes it so that you can hear everything, rather than 1 thing.

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Originally Posted by MoonstalkerZ

First, the community team's response of blaming user hardware may not be the opinion of the devs, or even of the individual community team members, but could be a result of orders from on high based on advice from lawyers. If SE delivered a non-functioning product, and the problem IS on their end, they could be liable for damages, depending on how the laws work in Japan. So though yes, the response sucks, we shouldn't be abusive to the community team - it's entirely possible they're just doing what the lawyers told them to, and being nasty isn't going to help them fix anything.

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I was just thinking about this point today. I figure if this indeed does go on long enough, they could be facing something along the lines of a class action lawsuit. After all, they put out a benchmark to help players test for system readiness prior to purchasing the expansion, and many players no doubt ran the benchmark and later ordered the expansion and purchased game time confident they’d be able to enjoy the game with their current hardware (congestion aside). The fact that many are now discovering that their hardware is now unable to run the game as expected means that the benchmark was misleading. IMO, in this context, I feel a strategy of “blame the user’s hardware” will make matters worse, not better. If they refuse to properly fix this, they could be on the hook for paying out refunds on the expansion, playtime, and potentially any other purchases that depended on a working expansion (eg, you wouldn’t have bought a fantasia to try male Viera if you knew the game would be unplayable).

Could you imagine if something like Microsoft did this with Windows? Imagine releasing a tool to test for compatibility with the next version, claiming that it will work, allowing the customer to purchase the product, then making a late breaking change that they then refuse to fix later. Now imagine that the user has no way to know that it actually won’t work until they’ve already installed it and registered the license key. Going through the normal channels, that user is no longer eligible for a refund, but obviously they will want one if no fix is on the horizon. At this point the company essentially used a lie (working benchmark/compatibility tool) to get their mon y, and then ran. I’m fairly sure that in some form or fashion that move is illegal in most countries.

I feel like SE’s best bet would be to completely revert the sound driver to what it was in the benchmark even if that does mean breaking compatibility with that new plugin. That would at least make the game playable in the short term, and they can work on possibly bringing that back in later. Of course, if they’ve entered into some sort of contract with that company over this (I’d assume that SE gets a portion of the sales of that sound pack, otherwise, why would SE bother in the first place?), that could seriously complicate this mess.

I haven’t heard anyone mentioning anything positive about the sound plugin, so it makes me wonder if sales will be a flop for it.

Anyway, I’ll post a detailed bug report around Monday or so when I return home.

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Originally Posted by -BlueGreen-

I was just thinking about this point today. I figure if this indeed does go on long enough, they could be facing something along the lines of a class action lawsuit. After all, they put out a benchmark to help players test for system readiness prior to purchasing the expansion, and many players no doubt ran the benchmark and later ordered the expansion and purchased game time confident they’d be able to enjoy the game with their current hardware (congestion aside). The fact that many are now discovering that their hardware is now unable to run the game as expected means that the benchmark was misleading. IMO, in this context, I feel a strategy of “blame the user’s hardware” will make matters worse, not better. If they refuse to properly fix this, they could be on the hook for paying out refunds on the expansion, playtime, and potentially any other purchases that depended on a working expansion (eg, you wouldn’t have bought a fantasia to try male Viera if you knew the game would be unplayable).

Could you imagine if something like Microsoft did this with Windows? Imagine releasing a tool to test for compatibility with the next version, claiming that it will work, allowing the customer to purchase the product, then making a late breaking change that they then refuse to fix later. Now imagine that the user has no way to know that it actually won’t work until they’ve already installed it and registered the license key. Going through the normal channels, that user is no longer eligible for a refund, but obviously they will want one if no fix is on the horizon. At this point the company essentially used a lie (working benchmark/compatibility tool) to get their mon y, and then ran. I’m fairly sure that in some form or fashion that move is illegal in most countries.

I feel like SE’s best bet would be to completely revert the sound driver to what it was in the benchmark even if that does mean breaking compatibility with that new plugin. That would at least make the game playable in the short term, and they can work on possibly bringing that back in later. Of course, if they’ve entered into some sort of contract with that company over this (I’d assume that SE gets a portion of the sales of that sound pack, otherwise, why would SE bother in the first place?), that could seriously complicate this mess.

I haven’t heard anyone mentioning anything positive about the sound plugin, so it makes me wonder if sales will be a flop for it.

Anyway, I’ll post a detailed bug report around Monday or so when I return home.

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The second you start siding with blood sucking lawyers you are no better than the Ascians.

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Originally Posted by ChilledApple

And thats where i doesn't add up. I am having this issue most in single instances like the rising stones and every inn room. With the spatial audio pack activated i just have to enter those instances and wait a few seconds until the audio breaks. However with the pack activated combat is fine. If i deactivate the audio pack it is exactly reverted. Single instances are fine unless i am not using any Skills, but combat sound is broken.

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My issues are almost exclusively in combat, weather they be in the over world or instances, although I will get minor stuttering anywhere it’s nothing compared to the harsh sounds that happen in combat.

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Originally Posted by Ariel_Valmont

My issues are almost exclusively in combat, weather they be in the over world or instances, although I will get minor stuttering anywhere it’s nothing compared to the harsh sounds that happen in combat.

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For my part, I get stuttering in residential districts, housing (apts, house, FC room, etc.), instanced rooms (inn rooms, Rising Stones, etc.), cities, overworld, instanced battle areas (dungeons, raids, etc.). I've even been getting stuttering (using the Immerse Gamepack) in overworld-based cutscenes. Granted, stuttering/slowdown is *often* associated with the sound effects from battles (SGE's Dyskrasia is especially useful for testing this, especially piling on other actions and OGCDs to generate more sound effects all at once), but even crafting or ambient sounds also seem to add onto it—and all of that is based on directionality, it'd seem, tied up in spatialization.

I just had Tsukuyomi come up on my Trial roulette, and it made me sad because the sound broke even before the fight started, so I had to mute the entire thing. I love that fight, the music, her voice lines, everything. But in addition to losing all of that, I lost my audio cues for stack markers and other mechanics, which made the fight four times harder - especially as a healer, since now my eyes have to do all of the work in the fight.

So, after the fight, I decided to go into Accessibility Settings and found the Visual Alerts option. I turned this on. For those who have never used this (as I hadn't), this basically puts equalizer bars on both sides of your screen that show the sound being played in the game. Unlike nearly every other game I've ever played, FF14 does not actually switch the sound "off" then you mute it or turn it off. You can turn Master Volume down to 0 AND mute it and all of the sound effects will keep playing. You just aren't hearing them. I guess is because it needs those effects, music, etc, for the visual alert system?

Anyway. Getting back to my point. The visual alerts. They show the distorted audio. That means that it's actually conclusive proof that it's Final Fantasy itself that's causing these problems, since if it were feeding "clean" audio out of the game and it was our computers mucking it up, then FF should show "clean" visual cues. Not the distorted ones. That means that FF itself is aware of the issues, which wouldn't be the case if the problem was in the game audio being pumped into our system.

At least, so it seems to me.

EDIT: Interestingly, if I mute master volume, the visual cues still show distorted audio. I can tell because whenever I cast Dyskrasia, if it doesn't distort, I get a clean, single push out on the bottom-most equalizer bar. When it's distorted, that bar will push out and bounce a few times before going down. With the sound muted, I'm still getting the bounce 2 out of 3 casts.

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Originally Posted by Maeklos

I just had Tsukuyomi come up on my Trial roulette, and it made me sad because the sound broke even before the fight started, so I had to mute the entire thing. I love that fight, the music, her voice lines, everything. But in addition to losing all of that, I lost my audio cues for stack markers and other mechanics, which made the fight four times harder - especially as a healer, since now my eyes have to do all of the work in the fight.

So, after the fight, I decided to go into Accessibility Settings and found the Visual Alerts option. I turned this on. For those who have never used this (as I hadn't), this basically puts equalizer bars on both sides of your screen that show the sound being played in the game. Unlike nearly every other game I've ever played, FF14 does not actually switch the sound "off" then you mute it or turn it off. You can turn Master Volume down to 0 AND mute it and all of the sound effects will keep playing. You just aren't hearing them. I guess is because it needs those effects, music, etc, for the visual alert system?

Anyway. Getting back to my point. The visual alerts. They show the distorted audio. That means that it's actually conclusive proof that it's Final Fantasy itself that's causing these problems, since if it were feeding "clean" audio out of the game and it was our computers mucking it up, then FF should show "clean" visual cues. Not the distorted ones. That means that FF itself is aware of the issues, which wouldn't be the case if the problem was in the game audio being pumped into our system.

At least, so it seems to me.

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This is an excellent find! I can confirm I have the same thing happening: the visual alert signals also reflect stuttered/slowed-down audio. On the one hand, this is troubling, since I was already hoping to use visual alerts to get by to rely on something resembling audio cues without having to listen to headache-inducing audio, but if that's *also* being affected, then determining patterns and getting used to it may also be affected. On the other hand, it *is* evidence that this is being produced and used by FFXIV within FFXIV, and not something that FFXIV is itself feeding into (like an external sound driver or something).

But also, it's interesting how different things, while getting stuttered, slow down at different rates. Some things just get choppy in order to keep up with all the stuff that happens, but other sounds (like the BGM) just get slowed down for the duration of the stutter without trying to "catch up" with what we'd expect on a system that doesn't have such issues.

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Originally Posted by Maeklos

I just had Tsukuyomi come up on my Trial roulette, and it made me sad because the sound broke even before the fight started, so I had to mute the entire thing. I love that fight, the music, her voice lines, everything. But in addition to losing all of that, I lost my audio cues for stack markers and other mechanics, which made the fight four times harder - especially as a healer, since now my eyes have to do all of the work in the fight.

So, after the fight, I decided to go into Accessibility Settings and found the Visual Alerts option. I turned this on. For those who have never used this (as I hadn't), this basically puts equalizer bars on both sides of your screen that show the sound being played in the game. Unlike nearly every other game I've ever played, FF14 does not actually switch the sound "off" then you mute it or turn it off. You can turn Master Volume down to 0 AND mute it and all of the sound effects will keep playing. You just aren't hearing them. I guess is because it needs those effects, music, etc, for the visual alert system?

Anyway. Getting back to my point. The visual alerts. They show the distorted audio. That means that it's actually conclusive proof that it's Final Fantasy itself that's causing these problems, since if it were feeding "clean" audio out of the game and it was our computers mucking it up, then FF should show "clean" visual cues. Not the distorted ones. That means that FF itself is aware of the issues, which wouldn't be the case if the problem was in the game audio being pumped into our system.

At least, so it seems to me.

EDIT: Interestingly, if I mute master volume, the visual cues still show distorted audio. I can tell because whenever I cast Dyskrasia, if it doesn't distort, I get a clean, single push out on the bottom-most equalizer bar. When it's distorted, that bar will push out and bounce a few times before going down. With the sound muted, I'm still getting the bounce 2 out of 3 casts.

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I've found all the new classes with super aoe seem to trigger sound stuttering. You would be hard pressed to find a tank that only does 3 at a time. 100% of the ones I have encountered even with 2 dragoons with limited aoe, run about gathering half the dungeon only to then have the sound cut out horribly. And then have the fight take 4x longer than it should.

Too many WoW refugee's, they are adopting their old methods in a new game; And it is breaking it.

Don't even try to tell them to slow down either, the tank will proclaim he is the only dps needed. And you will forfeit your commendations. Just stay silent, and deal with the fallout.