Audio popping issue

[Lagunow]

No, spatial audio plugin doesn't fix it. It's the other way around actually, activating it instantly triggers the glitch.

[Maeklos]

After I broke my sound in the Rising Stones, I did a few roulettes. Having set FF14's process to Realtime in Task Mananger seems to occasionally fix the sound. I was able to do Brayflox (normal), Cape Westwind, and Labyrinth of the Ancients with minor issues that corrected themselves (similar to 6.0). But when I did my 50/60/70/80 roulette, I got Sunken Temple (Hard). On the very first fight, the sound broke all the way with massive, headache-inducing G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G constantly so I had to turn it off. Halfway through the dungeon, I turned sound back on and it was G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G still.

This is frustrating. And still no word of them working on it. Le sigh.

[ArcheusWren]

Just chiming in as another person experiencing this issue. I know there are other people out there with this problem that haven't visited the official forums or logged a support ticket - so SE probably doesn't have a true understanding of the impact of this. <500 of players posting in this thread is less than 1% of their guessed playerbase. Unfortunately they are probably going to continue to try and shift the blame to the players hardware even though it was a software change they have made that has caused all this.

My hardware configuration hasn't changed since before Endwalker released, and the issue has occurred since Endwalker release. No other game suffers this issue. SE, this is an issue you have caused, not the players. Step up and do something about it.

[Ariel_Valmont]

On the previous page there was a quote with some things to try changing the power options and a couple other things, they seemed to have lessened the issue but it still persists.

[Nisava]

I've sent a few emails about the audio issues, but the copy paste replies that don't relate to my inquiry don't give me much faith. In fact, with every passing second I feel like I'm losing faith in the team... usually they're so good about keeping in touch with their community. Strange that when their paid service they didn't warn us about releases and screws up everything, suddenly they're quite quiet. Tried some more fixes today (including the one on the last page) but I'm convinced I'm just wasting my time.. it isn't an issue on any of our parts. Purely Square Enix, and I have this upsetting feeling in my gut they just want to convince us it's ours. It'd be nice to be proven wrong, but..

It's just hard to keep positive with how they've acted thus far. Just wanna play the game I paid 75$ for OTL. Would send in my specs but I play on the computer equivalent of a Gameboy, so I imagine they'd just say some nonsense about my hardware. 3-5 fps + slower movement/client speed + constant lag, and I still never once had issue with audio during my time playing since 2019.. until that Spatial Audio nonsense dropped! The audio was usually smoother than the game itself for me!! Now it's the opposite. Straight up embarrassing on Squenix's part; fix what you broke. Seems like my Gameboy has more respect for the audio aspect of Endwalker than the company who created it.

[Lagunow]

Had a full play session in DX11 without issues last night. I think the most important things here were steps 2 and 3, which prioritize audio processes and allow for more power draw respectively.

I also have Graphics on High Desktop and the Equalizer set to Standard. I don't have the fancy AI sound thing installed and certainly don't intend to even try it after all this.

I just tested your solution. It does not completely fix it, as I can still hear some minor chopping, but there is definitely some semblance of normalcy now. At least, I'm currently spamming spells on rising stones and it didn't break the sound engine so far. If it keeps like this it could possibly be a temporary solution to make the game somewhat playable before SE fixes the engine.

I'm going to do some msq now and do some dungeons, then I'm going to update if it keeps working.

[Grimno]

I just want to say I am absolutely impressed so many people are coming together, putting their heads together, to try and solve this issue while the company isn't. Like we have legit hardware designers up in here adding to the equation.

No video game website will have an article that says "Final Fantasy XIV's Audio is Buggy, Here's What the Community Is Trying to Do to Fix it" but they sure will go on about low polygon grapes...

[GorthRedsteel]

Could someone try to get in touch with that sound dev we had our little twitter interaction before? Perhaps link him this thread. I know english is not his primary language but I'm sure he would be able to get some useful information about the issue at hand. It might be desperate but hell, what else can we do - for sure not play the game we have payed for! )))))

[Tuomas]

Ok, the new Immerse Audio Gamepack developed by Embody might be the responsible for all the issues we've been having including the Directx 11 errors. Doesn't matter if you have it installed or not, the game changed something in order to be compatible with the Immersive Gamepack.

It's no coincidence that Embody's setup guide says that "some ambiental sounds are affected" and that you should "lower your audio sample rate on WINDOWS to avoid crashes/stuttering", what is going on?. Then again, doesn't matter if you have it enabled or not, of course the devs had to change something in order to make the 6.0 version compatible with Embody's new plugin.

Embody's team is very, very small. They're gathering "some" feedback from twitter and are saying that they are reporting bugs to the devs, which makes the bug solving take more time than usual.

Square should've developed this plugin/feature themselves if they wanted to add something cool like this. FFXIV is such a code fest that you shouldn't rely on 3rd party plugins.

It's a good feature I'm not gonna lie, it sounds great when it works, but not worth at all with these many issues. We never had this many audio issues before.

[Grimno]

Ok, the new Immerse Audio Gamepack developed by Embody might be the responsible for all the issues we've been having including the Directx 11 errors. Doesn't matter if you have it installed or not, the game changed something in order to be compatible with the Immersive Gamepack.

It's no coincidence that Embody's setup guide says that "some ambiental sounds are affected" and that you should "lower your audio sample rate on WINDOWS to avoid crashes/stuttering", what is going on?. Then again, doesn't matter if you have it enabled or not, of course the devs had to change something in order to make the 6.0 version compatible with Embody's new plugin.

Embody's team is very, very small. They're gathering "some" feedback from twitter and are saying that they are reporting bugs to the devs, which makes the bug solving take more time than usual.

Square should've developed this plugin/feature themselves if they wanted to add something cool like this. FFXIV is such a code fest that you shouldn't rely on 3rd party plugins.

It's a good feature I'm not gonna lie, it sounds great when it works, but not worth at all with these many issues. We never had this many audio issues before.

Right now, the thing people need most is someone from the team to just say
"We are aware of crackling/popping audio for some users after Endwalker's release and are investigating the cause. We will post on the Ongoing Issues page when we have new information."
It would create peace of mind.