Ingame Sound/Music extrem stuttering in battles

Since patch 6.0 the sound in the game starts to stutter extremely at the beginning of the fight and is played slowly and distorted. Switching to Direct X9 didn't work. Graphics drivers are up-to-date, changing the audio frequency did not help either. Headphones replaced by speakers, no success. Windows update to no avail. Right now I'm reinstalling FF14, but I don't expect any improvement.

I am - to say the least - frustrated and hope that a hotfix is ​​already in the works. I will add the technical details here as soon as the game is reinstalled.

Same. Combat is impossible like this unless you don't have sound. Considering all the threads here mentioning sound, I would really hope they are aware and are working on a fix. They borked something about sound with this patch.

I have also been having this issue, especially in combat! I also have checked graphics drivers being up to date, audio drivers, checking with a set of speakers, windows update, reinstalling FFXIV, checking to see if windows was trying to "enhance" the audio in device settings, using a usb adaptor, and no success.

Mainly commenting to help boost all the threads talking about audio issues to hope that they are aware and can work on a fix.

Same here I am having audio issues as well but mine is not just combat literally everywhere ex. the start screen, the character selection screen. tried reinstall, update pc and gpu none of which solved the issue hopefully they can addressed it asap.

Already replied to the other thread, might as well reply here as well if it helps someone. I was experiencing stuttering audio in various situations with a Logitech wireless headset. For me changing equalizer mode to "standard" from audio settings solved everything. Also running DX11 with a very old system. Equalizer used to work fine before 6.0.

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Originally Posted by Pachy

Same here I am having audio issues as well but mine is not just combat literally everywhere ex. the start screen, the character selection screen. tried reinstall, update pc and gpu none of which solved the issue hopefully they can addressed it asap.

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I'm fine on the start screen (and the movie plays without issues) and character select screen and intermittently get stuttering with music and have dialogue dropped in cutscenes because it's slow and stops when the character's mouths stop. What's been weird about that is I go to my FC house and the songs on my Orchestrion list are stuttering. Then I go to Eulmore and the BGM is crystal clear. Battle is consistently distorted.

And everything was fine Wednesday. Wednesday good, Friday awful.

This has been happening to me too. It's horrible in dungeons, but happens all over. I really hope there is a fix to this, cause it makes playing pretty unpleasant.

Also been happening to me. Same as above, everywhere but mostly in dungeons, especially in combat. Though when they stutter I also get fps stutters at the same time.

I am having sound issues as well. As far as I can tell it is regulated to 'background music' but the stuttering has curtailed my enthusiasm to see what a voiced cutscene would be like. There's moments where things sound fine but then the stuttering happens followed by the music sounding slowed down before more stuttering.

Has SE or anyone figured out any actual fix for this? Has reinstalling the entire game actually helped? I don't know if I could take spending a day uninstalling FFXIV and then reinstalling it....

I've also tried every suggested "fix" with no success. Frustrating when voiced cut scenes stutter and dialog cuts off.....distracting to rotation flow during dungeons....open world stutters in random place....even alone in Inn rooms it stutters. Re-ran the Endwalker Benchmark with a "High" rating, and no frame rate or audio issues. Everything was fine until the 6.0 patch.

I know the Devs have a lot on the go right now, and Early Access is when they iron out as many bugs as possible before official release, just hope they're seeing these threads.

PS... THANK YOU DEVS.... we love what you do.

UPDATE: As proposed in a thread elsewhere, I attempted to install EMBODY'S Immerse Audio Gamepack Trial. Although this seemed at first to finally fix the issue, my PC blue screened in the middle of the first Voiced Cut scene after the install. I have no definitive proof yet that the plugin caused the crash, as I'm now in a 5.5K World Login Queue, but I find the timing very suspicious. More updates to come.

UPDATE 2: Installing the Spacial Sound plugin did not fix the audio stutters.

UPDATE 3: Last night, prior to the maintenance shutdown, I was still searching for a fix to the audio issue. In an unrelated to FFXIV Thread, I found some posts about similar issues with other gaming systems. The issue in those cases seemed to be CPU Throttling. After monitoring my CPU and GPU usage during game play, I concluded that the similarities were striking. It appeared that the poor optimization of the FFXIV software was causing higher than normal CPU use, and overheating the CPU, causing throttling issues as it attempted to shed excess heat. I increased the fan speed cut-off settings, and the more stable heat distribution almost IMMEDIATELY solved the stuttering issue. I know the Devs were looking into reports of audio issues and had plans to implement fixes with a future patch(not sure if that was included in last nights maintenance patch) so, hopefully if my discoveries don't help you, the Dev's hotfixes will.