I am having a major sound problem in Win XP that I dont seem to be able to shake. I am running a P3 850, 768MB SDRAM, 80GB HD.
When I play JEdi Outkast 2, or High Heat Baseball 2003, and a few other newer games my sound is VERY choppy or nearly non existant. Its bad to the point where I cant even play the games. I thought it may have been my sound card, Soundblaster Live Value, so I went out and bought an Audigy card which is one of the best you can get and the problem is still there. I have wiped the system out and reloaded the OS and the problem is still there. I am stumped. I am thinking there must be some sort of issue with my motherboard but I am unsure. I have updated the OS, soundcard drivers, and updated the games and the problem is still there. In Jedi the problem is only in the menus. Once I get into the game itself it is fine. In HHBB2003 its all jacked even in the game.
Which drivers are you using? The official-release Creative drivers at the Creative website do not work right in WinXP; see the related Creative/Audigy newsgroup for further cursing. The exact problem is that WinXP can automatically load basic drivers for the Creative cards, so you hear regular wav’s playing and whatnot, but the basic brivers do not allow any of the advanced on-board (soundcard) features to be used by any software.
Compaq produced some beta drivers for Compaqs with WinXP, available here:
http://www.warp2search.net/article.php?sid=4276&mode=thread&order=0
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----377 megs! (three-hundred-and-seventy-seven megabytes)
“Scotty, full power to cable modem!”
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These are said to work for many other PC’s that are non-Compaq, but I got no WinXP so I don’t know personally. Good luck… - DougC
Odd: I haven’t been having that problem with WinXP, and I’m also using a SoundBlaster Live! (MP3) card (older one: first generation of that line, I belive.) Are you using one of the older cards or a newer one?
What do you have running in the background when you’re playing these games? Any fancy mouse cursors, etc? Have you set WinXP’s visual doo-dads stuff to ‘best performance’? (And of course for the life of me, I can find the menu to do that when I’m just fooling around with my system, but when I try to find it… Gah!) If it doesn’t turn out to be the drivers, then there’s probably something sucking up the CPU cycles and/or memory in the background… either that, or you haven’t made your monthy sacrifice to the WinXp demons yet.
I went and bought a new Gforce4ti 4200 (which is totally f’n badass BTW) just because I wanted to upgrade my video card. Well, my old card was an ATI 64MB DDR VIVO card. Once I replaced it with GF4, WHAMMO! Sound works fine now in all games.
On top of that, I used to not be able to connect to Audio Galaxy but now I can.
WTF caused this mess? I used the newest drivers from ATI and the old ones that came with XP just for grins and never had right sound or AG now I change VIDEO cards and it works??
Yea, one: the default Windows media player detected the soundcard’s advanced features, but the drivers you have aren’t the right ones, so when any sound source tried to use the advanced soundcard features, it didn’t work right.
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When you installed the videocard, it installed its own media player as the default, and the videocard’s media player didn’t try to detect the soundcard’s on-board functions, or ever try to use them. So it appears that now, the soundcard works right. It plays ordinary wav’s and MIDI’s, like I said it would.
Only, it doesn’t: if you had one of many examples of various advanced music-creation software, you could attempt to use the soundcard’s on-board MIDI/wav synthisis, environmental audio effects (some games include support for EAX, and attempt to use it automatically), soundfonts or memory management. And it wouldn’t work, because if you don’t have the Compaq drivers installed, the Creative soundcard’s advanced functions don’t work, for any Creative card in WinXP.
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About the Audio Galaxy thing, I have no clue. It’s possible there’s a audio media file decoder built into the soundcard hardware, and also identified by the drivers, but that is unusable because the generic WinXP drivers are only basic and the full regular drivers don’t work right. - DougC
You certain on that? Like I said in an above post, I’m using a Creative card, and everything is working perfectly. EAX, soundfonts, on-board synthisis… all I did was install the update from Creative on it. No problems whatsoever.
Well then I guess I can’t be certain, but the word on the Creative newsgroups is that the Compaq drivers are required. -And I myself just recently tried test-installing my SBLive 5.1 in a friend’s Gateway running WinXP, and what happened was what the people on the newsgroup say what happens. Without the monster drivers, it will play basic sound files, but doesn’t allow using any of the advanced features of the card.
