How to Fix... Looping Sound with System Freeze problem

[OneTinSoldier]

Hi all,

I used to have a couple of problems. The most annoying one was my PR and my PC System would be frozen(locked up) with a constantly looping sound. Sometimes it was a PR weapon sound that would be looping, sometimes it would be sound bite from voip. Usually a weapon sound though. I would encounter this problem two or three times a day. The only choice I would have was to shut off the power to the system. Ctrl-Alt delete to bring up the Task Manager didn't work, Ctrl+Esc to bring up the Start Program menu didn't work, nor did pressing the Power Down button on the front of the PC. I would have to cut the power completely off with the switch in the back(PSU power button).

Here's what I believe is a 100% cure/fix for this problem as it's been several days now since I made the change. I wanted to be sure it really fixed the problem before posting the cure.


Turn your 'Sound Quality' setting from High(or Ultra High) to Medium.

If you have Hardware and EAX options checked you can leave them checked.


I have an Audigy 2 Platinum Soundcard and had my Sound Quality setting on High. After setting it to Medium, I don't really notice too much difference in the sound quality. I have heard there is a noticeable difference if you have an X-Fi Soundcard and set it to Ultra High. So X-Fi owners that are having this problem might cringe at the thought of turning it down to Medium. All I can say is, if you want/value system stability, this is the fix. Naturally, the choice is yours.

This problem indicates some sort of a slight problem with the format(for lack of a better word/knowledge) with one of the sounds in PR. I say slight because it seems not all systems are having this problem. Perhaps the number of systems it affects might just be a minority, but I do know it does affect a number of users/systems. There is a thirteen page thread about this problem on the PR forum. This problem is also present in another mod. Apparently it's a problem with the AT-ST Walker sound in the First Strike mod(a star wars mod).

Now, even vBF2 isn't completely perfect in regards to this sound problem on my system. On somewhat rare occasion I would get the looping weapon sound in vBF2 also, until the person with the weapon either fired it or changed weapons. But vBF2 never locked up/froze my system.

The other problem I was having was that vBF2 or PR would CTD(poof, game disappears and you're back at your desktop) and leave a dump file(.dmp file) in C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\Battlefield 2\Dmp. This would also happen about two or three times a day. This problem seems to be cured now too. If you have a bunch of dump files in that folder you can delete them to free up HD space, and probably speed up defragging your HD a little.

Just as an fyi, even though my systems is pretty old now by PC aging standards it consists of all high quality parts. Nothing cheap in it at all. For grins and giggles I will list my specs at the bottom.

Lastly, if you've been having this problem and this fixes it, I wouldn't mind hearing about it from you here!


Cheers,

OneTinSoldier



System Specs:

Intel P4 3.4C Northwood Core with Hyperthreading on Asus P4C800-E Deluxe(Intel 875P + ICH5R Chipset), Zalman 7000a-Cu HS/Fan, Enermax EG651P-VE 550W PSU, 2 GB Mushkin eXtreme Performance(2-2-2) Dual Channel PC3200 RAM, Samsung 214T MultiSync 21" Digital LCD Monitor(1600 x 1200 native res), HIS(ATI) X1950 Pro 512 MB AGP Videocard with IceQ3 Cooler and Catalyst v7.11 Driver, DirectX 9.0c v9.21.1148(November 2007 update), Creative Audigy2 Platinum Soundcard with Driver v02.09.0016, Logitech Z-5500 5.1 Speakers, Western Digital 250 GB w/8 MB Cache 7200 RPM Parallel ATA HDD, WinXP Pro SP2 32-bit, Norton Internet Security 2008(Firewall and Anti-Virus), Comcast Cable Internet Connection

[Harrelson]

i can assure you this works. thank you OneTinSoldier

[OneTinSoldier]

You're welcome Harrelson.

[BigBoss7556]

I turned the sounds to medium a few days ago and haven't had any crashes since.

[milobr]

I did it and kept having the freezing even though my card isn't an Audigy or X-FI.

What I did though was to set affinity for BF2.exe through Task Manager to only one processor (I have dual-core) and bang, it worked. For a while, though. A blue screen from hell appeared all from the random and the pc went off. I had to change the cards in the PCI slots in order to solve this problem and now it's working like a charm.

[[R-DEV]Jaymz]

Ok, I'm telling you that this is absolutely incorrect. It's merely coincidence that you don't get the freezing anymore. It is NOT sound related, I can assure you. I really don't mean to get pissed off because I know you're just trying to help. But I (and I know sofad as well) have no intention on letting people set their sounds to medium and thus, allow the BF2 engine to molest our audio work with shitty compression.

If a sound in BF2 is not compatible with the engine, it simply doesn't get played. It doesn't freeze the game and loop the sound (in which it shouldn't be able to play in the first place?). Also note that when you hit the screenshot button, the exact same thing happens except it unfreezes afterwards. Not sound related.

[unrealalex]

Originally Posted by [R-DEV]Jaymz

Ok, I'm telling you that this is absolutely incorrect. It's merely coincidence that you don't get the freezing anymore. It is NOT sound related, I can assure you. I really don't mean to get pissed off because I know you're just trying to help. But I (and I know sofad as well) have no intention on letting people set their sounds to medium and thus, allow the BF2 engine to molest our audio work with shitty compression.

If a sound in BF2 is not compatible with the engine, it simply doesn't get played. It doesn't freeze the game and loop the sound (in which it shouldn't be able to play in the first place?). Also note that when you hit the screenshot button, the exact same thing happens except it unfreezes afterwards. Not sound related.

I'm pretty certain it's punkbuster, i posted a big post about it here
http://www.realitymod.com/forum/show...45&postcount=3
I put my sound settings on medium and have not frozen yet but I only played a couple rounds.

[fubar++]

I have tried almost everything to fix this freezing/looping sound problem for few monts including changing all audio settings, and none of that hasn't worked. I have X-Fi Gamer and I really suspect that the problem is related to driver of it. There was similar problem with FH2 mod and I got it fixed by installing older X-Fi drivers, but this didn't work so well with PR, altought it doesn't seem to happen so often anymore. Now it either ramdomly mutes microphone at some stage or causes freezing.

I haven't yet tried all other PCI slots and goig to try that next, as there has been reported problems with X-Fi cards.

Specs: AMD Opteron 170, DFI NF4, 2GB Corsair, 240GB RAID0, Windows XP Pro 64-bit and X-Fi XtremeGamer.

Previous threads:

http://www.realitymod.com/forum/pr-f...er-t30268.html

http://www.realitymod.com/forum/game...10-t32980.html

Originally Posted by [R-DEV]Jaymz

Not sound related

How come you can tell it isn't sound related if you haven't been able to fix it?

[OneTinSoldier]

Sorry... I don't want to upset anyone at all. You are right, I'm just trying to help with this problem. But I am an honest person and I feel I must say what I think. With that said, I could certainly be wrong. But I have seen this kind of thing before. There has been problems with sound on many games and applications. I have downloaded mods for other games that caused crashes, and later on, sure enough, it was discovered by devs that it was a problem with a sound file. Same with mini-mods for a mod. A texture/sound mini-mod for FH 0.7(FH1), mods for Silent Hinter III, ect, ect. And I have seen problems with original un-modded games due to sound too. For some reason sound seems to be a sensitive api layer on Windows. Again, I could most certainly be wrong about the root of this problem, but I don't think this is just a coincidence.

I quote part of an article on the reason why Microsoft didn't include hardware sound rendering in Windows Vista. I encourage everyone to read the entire article found here...

http://pc.ign.com/articles/759/759538p1.html


"So imagine your surprise when you fire up one of your favourite games in Vista - say World of Warcraft or Prey - only to find your fancy EAX-endowed soundcard and 5.1 surround speakers are dribbling out flat, unenhanced stereo sound. Then, in a vain attempt to spruce up the audio by enabling EAX, you get a nice taut error message saying EAX is not detected on your hardware. What's going on?
Welcome to the world of Vista audio. And a brave new world it is.

The root of all these problems? Microsoft's Windows team made the bold decision to rewrite the Vista audio stack from the ground up, and in doing so they removed hardware acceleration for DirectSound. That's right. They took hardware support away from the most ubiquitous sound API implemented in games over the past several years.

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Why would the Windows team strip DirectSound of its hardware privileges? The reason goes all the way back to the days of Windows 3.1 in the early 1990s. Back then it was the beginning of the multimedia boom - the days when sound cards came bundled with CD-ROM drives. At that time Microsoft first incorporated its Multimedia Extensions (MME) API into Windows, which allowed an application to interface with a sound card, opening up a somewhat richer experience than the bleeps and bloops of the old PC speaker. However, the MME API was fairly rudimentary and included no support for channel mixing, so only one audio stream was rendered at a time.

Then with the release of Windows 98 came a new and more advanced audio stack based around the Windows Driver Model (WDM). This fully 32-bit audio stack was notably more sophisticated than the MME API and did allow the mixing of audio streams. Coupled with DirectSound and DirectSound3D, applications and games could send commands straight to the hardware, opening up a whole world of enhanced features, such as 3D positional audio and Creative's EAX.

However the new Windows audio stack's new strengths belied a critical weakness: much of the audio stack was run in kernel mode, right in the guts of Windows. This meant that if - heaven forbid - something went wrong and the audio stack crashed, there was a good chance it would drag the rest of Windows down with it."

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Sincerely,

OneTinSoldier

[[R-DEV]Jaymz]

Originally Posted by fubar++

How come you can tell it isn't sound related if you haven't been able to fix it?

Because like I said, if a sound is incompatible with the BF2 audio engine, it simply doesn't get played. Look what happens when you take a screenshot. It freezes and constantly loops that last few audio events. That has nothing to do with sound, just like this bug has nothing to do with sound.

EDIT: Wow, very very cool article onetin. Thanks a lot for posting that.