Audio popping issue

[Nyarlat]

I've found all the new classes with super aoe seem to trigger sound stuttering. You would be hard pressed to find a tank that only does 3 at a time. 100% of the ones I have encountered even with 2 dragoons with limited aoe, run about gathering half the dungeon only to then have the sound cut out horribly. And then have the fight take 4x longer than it should.

Too many WoW refugee's, they are adopting their old methods in a new game; And it is breaking it.

Don't even try to tell them to slow down either, the tank will proclaim he is the only dps needed. And you will forfeit your commendations. Just stay silent, and deal with the fallout.

You can be in the Rising Stones and reproduce the audio stuttering after 3 combos. Unless you wanna blame that on "WoW refugees" too? What even is this logic, we're dealing with tech issues here not some weird cultural issue.

[ChilledApple]

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.

EDIT: Interestingly, if I mute master volume, the visual cues still show distorted audio. I can tell because whenever I cast Dyskrasia, if it doesn't distort, I get a clean, single push out on the bottom-most equalizer bar. When it's distorted, that bar will push out and bounce a few times before going down. With the sound muted, I'm still getting the bounce 2 out of 3 casts.

Tried that today aswell, its the same for me here. It's a little bit funny that you can visualize the issue. Welp guess i have to keep playing with the audio pack for a while. My poor ears T_T

[MoonstalkerZ]

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.

This is a HUGE clue. If you haven't already, put this in the bug report, the devs need to see this.

I also encourage everyone to test this for yourselves, put it in your own bug reports, and make videos if that's within your abilities. The more proof we can gather, the quicker this gets fixed.

[Darthgummibear]

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.

EDIT: Interestingly, if I mute master volume, the visual cues still show distorted audio. I can tell because whenever I cast Dyskrasia, if it doesn't distort, I get a clean, single push out on the bottom-most equalizer bar. When it's distorted, that bar will push out and bounce a few times before going down. With the sound muted, I'm still getting the bounce 2 out of 3 casts.

This is the second time in less than a month that a community member has diagnosed a major issue in contradiction to Squeenix trying to blame people's hardware. This is nuts.

[Ariel_Valmont]

Don't sweat it. The vast majority of tanks are decent, and will keep an eye on their healer to see what they can conceivably handle. Once you hit Heavensward and onward, DPS will have good AoE, tanks will have plenty of CDs to rotate through, and healers will have most of their fancy heals. As I've been leveling Sage (88 as of right now), I've had the whole gamut of dungeons. I've only had one bad tank (a 63 PLD with that as their only class, so may have been a refugee) out of the few dozen runs I've done as Sage.

Which, getting back to the original point of this thread, has brought up some interesting data points with the sound issues. Crystal Tower raids, by and large, seem to be large unaffected (I think because the raid areas themselves are large and uncluttered, so no echo, etc). Since I'm a healer, I stand outside of the big fights, don't have a lot of positional sound BS going on. No issues.

But earlier dungeons? Copperbell has issues, Brayflox doesn't. Sastasha has issues, most ARR trials don't (I've gotten Ifrit like 5 times in the last week for dungeon roulettes, ugh). So far, I can't find any rhyme or reason to which dungeons might trigger sound issues and which don't.

For me it’s every dungeon/raid I’ve been in since release, and those have spanned all eras of the game.

[Teiren]

I'm happy, and confused, to say that I got absolutely zero stuttering in the first duty of the new raid. This was with Listening Position at 62, Party Effects at Limited, Others Effects at None, and Object Quantity at Low. Oh, as for my CPU temperature, from what I recall, it never goes above maybe 72 Celsius, usually around 60 while playing. I was worried the stuttering was ruining my computer, but it probably isn't.

[Rannzyr]

I've found all the new classes with super aoe seem to trigger sound stuttering. You would be hard pressed to find a tank that only does 3 at a time. 100% of the ones I have encountered even with 2 dragoons with limited aoe, run about gathering half the dungeon only to then have the sound cut out horribly. And then have the fight take 4x longer than it should.

Too many WoW refugee's, they are adopting their old methods in a new game; And it is breaking it.

Don't even try to tell them to slow down either, the tank will proclaim he is the only dps needed. And you will forfeit your commendations. Just stay silent, and deal with the fallout.

With all due respect your subjective opinion doesn't really matter.

Wow refugees are not causing this issue, rushed implementation of a flawed sound engine is.

Square enix are 100% responsible for this and your shouldn't try to place blame on players you personally dislike. We can only wait and hope this gets sorted but it probably won't any time soon because it's not an easy fix.

Well, it could be if they bothered to actually let us toggle it but the new deal must have been good

[Mousezilla]

I'm at that one level 88 quest in zone one (the one with the crying, you know what I'm talking about) and I have to put a pin in the MSQ until this issue gets resolved. Not only is Soken's music too good to turn off, but I rely a lot on sound queues for fights, which is unfortunately where the stuttering issue is the absolute worst. I can work on crafting and gathering and older content, but I can't do any roulettes that put me in the new content where I'm not familiar enough to manage without the sounds, or risk the glitch deciding to branch out into the voiced cutscenes. Like everyone else here, I didn't have this issue prior to 6.0, and it became impossible to ignore after 6.01 dropped.

You guys know I love and appreciate your hard work, and I've come to the forums to complain maybe twice in the... dear god, 8 years? Jesus. The probably-way-too-long time I've been playing. But this third-party sound software was a frankly iffy idea that maybe should have waited to be implemented sometime not during a huge launch when you would have had more eyes and hands free to catch this before it went FUBAR.

[Breezelyn]

Catching up on reading the thread, I decided to try what Maeklos did, because I rely on audio cues as well for boss fights. Including when I usually run heals, the audio cue for the big stack markers gets me ready for big heals. It's not much better, but... ugh. The audio stuttering has given me a migraine I can't get rid of. I'm on day 3 of having it, and it's NOT fun over the holidays. I took a break from the game most of the last night.

I just wish their damn sound engine was tested BEFORE they put it into the game. The benchmark would have been the best option to do it with. I just feel a bit duped with the game currently. I paid 40 USD for the expansion, then 15 USD a month (plus extra retainers on top of that). Just to have this game-breaking, audio stutter persisting to who-knows-when making it hard to actually do much. I'm just tired of getting headaches and migraines from something they could prevented. You know, TESTED before they released it into the actual game, and now, players/customers are paying for the consequences...literally.

Before anyone gets on me about this: We are paying real life money to play this game. It's NOT F2P where you can play without having to buy/pay for a cent to have access to said game. I love this game-- I want to be happy playing it. I've been with this mmo for a long while. Just this audio stutter is starting to affect me in real life at this point. If it's not fixed by next month before Savage, I don't know what I'm going to do.

[MoonstalkerZ]

I did some testing with the equalizer bars and crafting while facing away from the camera, which fairly reliably produces the audio stuttering. I've posted my results in my bug thread here.

I've also been reading through the bug reports posted on these forums. Someone said a few pages ago they knew someone with a Phenom CPU had no stuttering issues, and speculated that Phenom CPUs wouldn't cause this problem - however, this bug report indicates a user with a Phenom CPU is having the stuttering bug. So now we're up to FX, Ryzen, Phenom, and i7 CPUs having this problem, as well as (anecdotally) consoles - however this last only comes from something a forum poster reported reading in shout chat. If we could get someone on the forum with a PS4 or PS5 to confirm they have the stuttering bug, this would be a great help.

It's entirely possible that one source of the problem is something that happens with the CPU, but if it's happening with every type of CPU, then just getting a new CPU isn't going to fix the problem.