Audio popping issue

[RinKaenbyou]

They found out using Process Explorer and have been doing tests using it to see where CPU Usage spikes happen in combination with the sound issues. WinMM appears in the Thread stack while Xaudio no longer does when viewing the properties of ffxiv_dx11.exe via Process Explorer. As for DX9 stuff and XAudio, I'll have to get some answers for you on that when I can!

Speaking of which, further tests from them have found that muting sounds is actually raising CPU Usage which is something that shouldn't be happening. Their tests found that in Limsa with Ambient on and SFX off, CPU usage on the function likely causing the issues was 2.90%. With Ambient AND SFX Muted, CPU Usage on the likely offending function jumped to 7.36%. And with Ambient Muted and SFX Unmuted, CPU Usage for the offending function dropped to 1.55%.

Edit: Also yeah, removed the info from above post and put it here for better visibility and cause it was more relevant to the above message than in the original post.

Edit 2: A theory from my friend on CPU usage increase while muting audio. The audio effects are rendered even when muted, but then the engine has to selectively filter them out consuming a lot of extra cpu instead of just not rendering the sounds.

Edit 3: Got some DX9 info from my friend. They said that they are not sure about dx9. They've poked it a bit and it's not loading xaudio but its also not experiencing the issue. They said that it could be using WinMM and that there might be a bug in some function they've written that causes it to behave inversely on 64bit builds. Also, they shared the CPU Usage variables for Limsa they got while doing DX11 tests with sound muting which are as follows.

1.5 - 2.12% with nothing muted
1.5 - 3.4% with only Sound Effects Muted
1.3-2.75% with only Ambient Muted
6.0-7.5% with Ambient and Sound Effects muted.

[Larirawiel]

Interesting informations. But please do not make any assumptions about APIs in use like WinMM or Xaudio. Windows uses API wrappers for many things and it can be that some DLLs are loaded although the program does not use them directly. If you google after FF14 and WinMM then you will find many messages about winmm.dll which are some years old.

That the CPU utilization goes up when sounds are muted, this is also interesting. Rendering sound and then remove the rendered sound afterwards would be very bad programming practise. But since i have seen much source code of some "commercial" applications i do not wonder about something like this. It is called "technical debt" and if you do not pay attention to this it will overhelm you some day. I guess, SQEX is now at this point. Sins made in the past are now back and cost them real money. And they can not fix it quickly because it could break some other functionality.

Cheers

[RinKaenbyou]

Interesting informations. But please do not make any assumptions about APIs in use like WinMM or Xaudio. Windows uses API wrappers for many things and it can be that some DLLs are loaded although the program does not use them directly. If you google after FF14 and WinMM then you will find many messages about winmm.dll which are some years old.

That the CPU utilization goes up when sounds are muted, this is also interesting. Rendering sound and then remove the rendered sound afterwards would be very bad programming practise. But since i have seen much source code of some "commercial" applications i do not wonder about something like this. It is called "technical debt" and if you do not pay attention to this it will overhelm you some day. I guess, SQEX is now at this point. Sins made in the past are now back and cost them real money. And they can not fix it quickly because it could break some other functionality.

Cheers

My friend said you are correct about the API wrappers however they also said that even when using those wrappers the xaudio runtime would still be handle locked to prevent deletion and yet they can delete all the xaudio files while the game is running and even start it without them existing at all so it seems very likely that EW is completely using WinMM.

Edit: They've also found this CDev.Engine.Sd.SoundDriver CDev.Engine.Sd.SoundDriver %d [Voice]
UseVoice =
VoiceCount = %d/%d
AudioRenderSlave%d R E S S U C C E S S D O N E ja R E S S U C C E S S G O T O W E B A P P R E S F A I L C O N N E C T I O N R E S F A I L N O L I C E N S E R E S F A I L E X P I R E D L I C E N S E ja R E S F A I L P H O T O R E S F A I L C O N T A C T S U P P O R T R E S F A I L H R T F D O W N L O A D R E S F A I L H R T F S A V E R E S F A I L H R T F C O R R U P T R E S U N K N O W N SOFTWARE\Embody\Immerse Gamepack FINAL FANTASY XIV Edition InstallPath Library CreateResonanceAudioApi

Which led them to this https://resonance-audio.github.io/resonance-audio/

Which led to them coming to the conclusion that it's FMOD audio on top of WinMM.

[Shalyra]

My friend said you are correct about the API wrappers however they also said that even when using those wrappers the xaudio runtime would still be handle locked to prevent deletion and yet they can delete all the xaudio files while the game is running and even start it without them existing at all so it seems very likely that EW is completely using WinMM.

Edit: They've also found this CDev.Engine.Sd.SoundDriver CDev.Engine.Sd.SoundDriver %d [Voice]
UseVoice =
VoiceCount = %d/%d
AudioRenderSlave%d R E S S U C C E S S D O N E ja R E S S U C C E S S G O T O W E B A P P R E S F A I L C O N N E C T I O N R E S F A I L N O L I C E N S E R E S F A I L E X P I R E D L I C E N S E ja R E S F A I L P H O T O R E S F A I L C O N T A C T S U P P O R T R E S F A I L H R T F D O W N L O A D R E S F A I L H R T F S A V E R E S F A I L H R T F C O R R U P T R E S U N K N O W N SOFTWARE\Embody\Immerse Gamepack FINAL FANTASY XIV Edition InstallPath Library CreateResonanceAudioApi

Which led them to this https://resonance-audio.github.io/resonance-audio/

Which led to them coming to the conclusion that it's FMOD audio on top of WinMM.

You guys made quite the discovery! Its impressive
I really would love the old audio back just like it used to be before 6.0 ...

[Yin]

Hello,

German Twitter (I have not seen in it the EN Version yet) just announced



DE Twitter Post

https://twitter.com/FF_XIV_DE/status...521389575?s=20

We can then hear, where the stuttering comes from even better

In the truest sense of the word: ... "Sound Slayer"

Original Website

https://www.panasonic.com/de/consume...-gn01e-ff.html

Google Translate Website in EN

https://www-panasonic-com.translate....en&_x_tr_hl=de

Oh wait, while writing this post, I found this Loadstone News - Announcing the FFXIV Online Edition of Panasonic's Wearable Immersive Gaming Speaker System (WIGSS):

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...f2a6d7b20b93ba

with a link to this:

https://shop.panasonic.com/gaming-an...io/sc-gn01ppff

[Grimno]

Oh wait, while writing this post, I found this Loadstone News - Announcing the FFXIV Online Edition of Panasonic's Wearable Immersive Gaming Speaker System (WIGSS):

They tweeted about it and 80% of the replies in the Tweet are folks mentioning audio issues so it almost seems like the issues are spreading more.
Was also watching Pyromancer stream and he had audio cut out for him. While he was resetting the game I mentioned that 6.0 and 6.01 had caused a ton of audio issues for people and pointed out this thread with almost 950 posts and 100,000 views existed about audio issues and he said "That's pretty ****ing bad."
His Twitch chat was then popping up with others coming forward with their own audio issues, specifically popping audio. So there's definitely more people with issues then we're aware of.

[GorthRedsteel]

trying to spam this issue away by flooding it with hundreds of thousands of posts will only see the issue ignored. Perhaps you haven't noticed that this particular director doesn't buckle under floods.

Nor should he.

A investigation should be commenced of all audio output, mainly aimed at all new sound effects and combos effects introduced in this latest expansion.

Furthermore all sound affected by this new paid plug-in and all changes made to all sound channels need also be investigated.

What I have suggested alone will take the team 3 months to finish. They also have other duties introducing new parts of the latest expansion. They have to work along-side, and surpass the updates that will be coming for the story.

This isn't an excuse, rather than an explanation as to what is going on and their thoughts going forward. They will not be delaying the new expansion pack story to fix this, it all has to be done along side and past it.

Therefore it would behoove all involved to try to fix or mitigate the issues the best they can on their end until the source is corrected. I.E. overclocking your AMD processor, enabling virtual ram on separate drives other than the one running FFXIV, Making sure you aren't watching or streaming anything while playing.

for me on a msi 960 board; AMD FX(tm)-6300 Six-Core Processor 3.50 GHz, I get it to stop stuttering when I overclock via msi command center as follows... (ratio) 21.5/ (base clock) 201.00 with fans running at 95%

that brings it to 4.1 - 4.5 ghz it will fluctuate if on a msi board to demand.

People might have dismissed this post of yours thanks to all other ramblings you love to do in this thread, but surprisingly this had a DRASTIC IMPROVEMENT for me. I have finished Stormblood and its patch content today and had NO STUTTERING/VO CUTTING OUT during all of the cutscenes. The problems stills comes up in combat but I can deal with that. It's barely noticeable for me atm. Before overclocking my CPU, 85% of the dialog cutscenes had been HORRIBLE. Constant stuttering and audio popping, with acted out lines being slowed down to a point of cutting out halfway through text. Sometimes it would be a constant ear rape and nothing more - it was THAT bad. I have no idea how I was able finish ARR, with addition of full HW, and most of SB. Surly, that has reduced my potential enjoyment of these storylines but that's in the past now. Now I'm ready to have fun with Shadowbringers as that's the one expansion everyone praises over all. Can't wait!
For people still confused on what to do - I suggest you watch this short video as it explains what to do rather well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owrc2WWZS9w
CPU I own is AMD FX 8120. For it I've tried few different set ups but the one that seems the most stable is 4,1 GHz. I'm confident I could go higher but I really didn't wanna increase voltage control in BIOS as I use a dogshit stock cooler. I had troubles with overheating in the past. I'd also recommend changing your power plan to BALANCED (Control Panel > System and Security > Power Options) if you also have a shite cooling in your machine. It might feel redundant but I swear it helped me achieve peace regarding the sound issue.
Apologies for a chaotic comment but I'm tired AF, been up the whole day. Once again thank you Xenophine, and I hope others might find this useful. Good luck!

[Lagunow]

Well, hardware is still part of the issue in the sense that the intensity of the audio issues or complete lack of any of the audio issues on a person by person basis is likely due to the fact that mixing lengths can behave differently on different systems. The cause of the issue itself though is almost certainly 100% the audio engine changes they made and thus the game itself. Also, sadly, they likely can't revert the audio engine stuff to pre-EW because they have a contract with the Immersive Audio company. As a note, my friend is still doing tests as we speak to try and help. They just reproduced the audio stuttering while doing the Heavensturm Event Fate and found it occurred if they had SFX and Ambient turned off but turning either on the sound became normal for them.

Assuming they can't revert the engine and are contractually bound to embody, and they've already tried messing with buffer length to no avail, does your friend think there is anything else they could do about it or are we doomed?

[starshowers]

Hello! I just wanted to add to the voices of the people who are having this issue. It started in 6.01 for me, and occurs primarily in instances where a lot of battle effect sounds are playing at once, particularly alliance raids, trials, and 8-man raids. Thankfully I'm one of the lucky people for whom turning DirectX 11 off made the issue stop, but I'd rather not have to do it as a permanent solution as this has introduced other annoying issues for me (slow loading times, crashes, occasionally models don't load in). I just tested it again today in the hopes that 6.05 might have implemented a fix, but it did not. If there's any information I can provide that would be helpful in identifying what's going on, please let me know!

[ShadowedStranger]

https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...092f2ad32777b8

Is ok, sound popping issue does not exist as you can clearly see in the list of known issues.
By the way, just going to remind that this exists:
https://chng.it/s5ncRbDtKm