Audio popping issue

[polyphanes]

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.

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.

[Grimno]

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.

Agreed. That is an excellent find from Maeklos. Shows us with visual proof that it's indeed something on Square's end.