Disappearing sound

[Stefan Fredriksson]

A strange little problem I've noticed.

When I am in the giving-order phase sometimes the sound disappears. After about 10 seconds it comes back again. Almost like the PC has to rewind a tape and start it over.

Apparently this is the ambient sound.

When in movie-phase the glitch is never heard.

Soundcard: Sound Blaster Live /AMD Only

Mods: MDMP1 and 2

Any ideas?

[tenfive2]

Right now, I can hear the rain clearly. The orders fairly clear, the engines ok and the weapons firing at about 10% normal.

Whenever I have sound problems, I blow away the drivers and reboot.

[JMcGuire]

Sometimes I'll build up a machine and thanks to Creative's PnP implementation the sound card will end up with the same IRQ as the LPT port, or sometimes one of the serial ports. Then you'll get drop-outs and sometimes background static in your audio.

I should note this has only happened when I throw all the cards in there from the outset -- before the OS is loaded, in other words.

If your Windows version will allow it, you can try forcing a different IRQ on the sound card.

Alternately you can shut down, yank the sound card, start up, shut down again, replace the sound card, and start up again. It's a lot easier to just set up the machine, then stick the sound card in last.

At least Creative's PnP chips no longer try to take over the whole PnP bus initialization like "the old days" (which would be roughly 1998 in this case).