Client loses sound randomly

[Ferth]

Is there a chance that this is a physical connection issue? Something where your sound card or playback device loses power for a split second, and ffxiv loses sound entirely because of how poorly the game adapts to audio hardware changes?

[Riardon]

I understand your frustration...

I've written an application that reproduces the issue but I don't want to post it and get banned from the forums. I'd have to have Ariellendera's permission first. If Ariellendera can elevate this to a software developer I've pretty much pinpointed the code (as much as I can without actually having access to the code) that is the issue.

SE is using XAudio 2.7 as the audio backend. When the sound card device becomes unavailable for any reason you need to reinitialize all of the XAudio backend after catching IXAudio2EngineCallback::OnCriticalError() or you result with no audio playback.

The other solution is to move to XAudio 2.9 and windows 10 which obviously isn't a solution because it removes support for anything older than Windows 10.

I have absolutely no knowledge on this but if the issue is this then the whole thread is pointless. Although this agrees with my belief that the issue lies with XIV and its inflexible and prone to crashes audio, I can't prove it. I tried to post my observations as much detailed as I could. It's something that was bothering me many years but this time it crossed my limits of patience and understanding thus I took it on forums. I think SE knows what might be the issue on their end.

Is there a chance that this is a physical connection issue? Something where your sound card or playback device loses power for a split second, and ffxiv loses sound entirely because of how poorly the game adapts to audio hardware changes?

How am I supposed to know this? I'm not a hardware engineer and even If I was I doubt I could check this at home. Whatever the issue is it happens only with XIV. In other games I have absolutely no such issues. I got same issues over the years on two completely different systems. I seriously doubt it's a hardware thing. Digging in Reddit saw many others reporting such issues similar to mine.

[drebbe]

How am I supposed to know this? I'm not a hardware engineer and even If I was I doubt I could check this at home. Whatever the issue is it happens only with XIV. In other games I have absolutely no such issues. I got same issues over the years on two completely different systems. I seriously doubt it's a hardware thing. Digging in Reddit saw many others reporting such issues similar to mine.

If you have speakers in your monitor and its HDMI, disable everything else and use audio through HDMI.