Client loses sound randomly

[Riardon]

I have this very annoying issue.
The game loses sound randomly while ALT+TABing and sometimes while in game the game suddenly stops. No error message or crash the sound just goes away and the game requires a restart to enable sound back again. This happens only to this game and nowhere else. It's been around 2 months that this happens to me.

[DarkArvan]

Got the same problem here already multiple times since several months ago. also my client crashed very often with "xaudio.dll" or similar.
The sound system in this game seems very very unstable, you cant even change the output without restart the client.

[Einmimiria]

Good Morning, and thank you for posting on the Final Fantasy XIV Technical Support Forums.

When exactly did this start happening and do you recall anything changing on your PC that coincides with it?

Do you happen to have a dedicated sound card? Or is it integrated into the motherboard? What kind of speaker set up do you have?

Any additional information will be helpful in finding a solution.

We hope we can be of assistance in helping you enjoy the exciting world of Final Fantasy XIV!

[drebbe]

If your audio driver crashes FFXIV is unable to handle it due to poor coding quality. Your only option is to look into your driver as SE won't fix this issue. Its been around since 2.0.

[Alien_Gamer]

I've noticed recently that Discord will interfere with FF14 using the default sound device on my laptop. If I have Discord running before launching the game it will launch without sound or if I start Discord after starting FF14 the game will crash because it can't access the drivers anymore. Perhaps something similar is happening to you?

[cafffine]

Ive had the same issue for some time now. Mid run or just standing around and all sound drops out of nowhere.

[Riardon]

Good Morning, and thank you for posting on the Final Fantasy XIV Technical Support Forums.

When exactly did this start happening and do you recall anything changing on your PC that coincides with it?

Do you happen to have a dedicated sound card? Or is it integrated into the motherboard? What kind of speaker set up do you have?

Any additional information will be helpful in finding a solution.

We hope we can be of assistance in helping you enjoy the exciting world of Final Fantasy XIV!

My PC is new. My specs are i7-8700K, Motherboard Gigabyte 370 Gaming 7 and Nvidia GTX970 Windows 10 Pro x64 (latest update)
My setup is clean with latest drivers (motherboard, sound, graphics etc).
No AV programs installed.
I had the same issue with my older PC as well just not that frequently.
Note that only the game's sound stops and nothing else. Music plays in the background. YouTube and other games behave normally.
This issue is very old with the game it's just now that happens to me so frequently. Today it happened 2 times already.
It's so frustrating to restart the game so often to get sound back. I had this issue since XIV 2.0 launched but it was very rare.
I've never seen it to happen so often. Now I get this issue around 2 times per day and I don't know what to do.

[Ariellendera]

Hello Riardon, Thank you for your reply,

Do you use any overlays or background programs? If so try disabling them. please let us know if this makes a difference.

Hope to be be assistance.

[Riardon]

Hello Riardon, Thank you for your reply,

Do you use any overlays or background programs? If so try disabling them. please let us know if this makes a difference.

Hope to be be assistance.

No I don't use overlays.
Little update. Game just crashed giving me this sound related error message.

https://imgur.com/a/ZPSxz

Edit: I also noticed game loses sound when Discord is launched. For now I'm avoiding it and using Skype.

[drebbe]

Any change in system audio can cause this issue due to a bug in SE's Audio implementation. These things can cause this issue:

1.) Removal or Addition of a sound device.
2.) Changing the default Audio Device.
3.) Driver Crash / Driver reload.
4.) Unplugging USB Headset.

Now for the programming side of it:

They are using XAudio for their backend and not properly handing IXAudio2EngineCallback::OnCriticalError() since they are specifying the default audio device with parameter szDeviceId of IXAudio2::CreateMasteringVoice.

from Microsoft's msdn:

If you provide the ID of a specific device in the szDeviceId parameter to IXAudio2::CreateMasteringVoice or use the XAUDIO2_NO_VIRTUAL_AUDIO_CLIENT flag, then a critical error will occur and OnCriticalError is raised if the underlying WASAPI rendering device becomes unavailable. This can occur when a headset or speaker is unplugged or when a USB audio device is removed, for example. Once a critical error has occurred, audio processing stops and all further calls to XAudio2 fail. The only way to recover in this situation is to release the XAudio2 instance and create a new one.

If you specified NULL or szDeviceId parameter to IXAudio2::CreateMasteringVoice, then the system uses a Virtual Audio Client to represent the audio endpoint. In this case, if the underlying WASAPI rendering device becomes unavailable, the system automatically selects a new audio rendering device for rendering, audio processing continues, and OnCriticalError is not raised.

SE could literally fix this with three lines of code.