Crackling sound

[jwenham 1]

I've been flying all morning and haven't noticed any issues with it set to 512....and no crackling/popping :(

Do you have it set as 512000000? What VC do you have? I tried setting mine to 512000000 and when I do all the aircraft are all messed up looking. My card has 896 mb.

[sargeski 16]

jwenahm,Just curious are you using Vista x64 as well??

[Pepsimachine 10]

Do you have it set as 512000000? What VC do you have? I tried setting mine to 512000000 and when I do all the aircraft are all messed up looking. My card has 896 mb.

Yes, and I have the same video card as you.

[jwenham 1]

jwenahm,Just curious are you using Vista x64 as well??

I am using XP 32bit with the USERVA switch.

[JimmiG 244]

If your having crackling in DX10 as well, you have other issues.

It's easy to just say something is wrong with the system, but out of the 20 or so games I've played recently, plus about five pro audio applications I use, FSX is the only one to exhibit these problems at all. If 25 apps works perfectly fine and one doesn't, doesn't it make more sense to blame the app that doesn't work as expected, rather than the system itself?

[sargeski 16]

It's easy to just say something is wrong with the system, but out of the 20 or so games I've played recently, plus about five pro audio applications I use, FSX is the only one to exhibit these problems at all. If 25 apps works perfectly fine and one doesn't, doesn't it make more sense to blame the app that doesn't work as expected, rather than the system itself?

JimmiG,I apologize for not phrasing that correctly, I should have said "may have other issues". Pro Audio Applications are not going to saturate the PCI-E bus like FSX does so I would not expect that one would see this issue with such a program (however I guess that it could be possible depending on how many channels are simultaneously being procesed). It can also be a driver or piece of hardware not playing well with FSX. If FSX was purely the one at fault everyone and their brother would be experiencing this sound issue but that is not the case. So that would tend to make it a system issue wether it be motherboard chipset, bios, driver etc...

[sargeski 16]

I am using XP 32bit with the USERVA switch.

jwenham,XP 32bit manages memory in a completely different manner than Vista x64. That being said, I am not suprised that the "tweak" did not work in your case.

[JimmiG 244]

If FSX was purely the one at fault everyone and their brother would be experiencing this sound issue but that is not the case

A number of users *are* experiencing this problem to some degree with FSX however, and with FSX only. So this suggests that even if sound isn't plain "broken" in FSX, the sim itself is "problematic" with regards to sound. More so than any other existing game or sim.I still haven't found a solution. The DPC Latency Checker does a great job of telling me what I already know: Sound doesn't work as it should in FSX. It stays in the green always at the desktop and when running other games, but the bars shoot into the red like a rocket as soon as I start a flight with FSX. All the drivers are up to date etc., so there's nothing more I can do at the "user end" short of decompiling the drivers and try to improve them myself....which I can't.What FSX does differently from other games is the way it loads scenery. Oblivion and Fallout3 also feature large-scale scenery, but the scenery is divided into "zones". As soon as you cross the border into a new zone, the scenery is shifted. Even X-Plane loads scenery in this way by periodically "shifting" the scenery at specific points or intervals. I imagine some systems might experience crackling sound during these "shifts", but not otherwise. On my system, sound never breaks up in those games.FSX on the other hand continuously streams new scenery from the disk and rebuilds near, mid and far distant scenery all the time as you fly. Maybe this constant thrashing of the harddrive and textures being sent across the PCI-E bus is too much for some PCs that handle all other games and apps just fine. That doesn't explain why the problem gets worse over forests and nearly disappears over cities however. :(

[Guest Nick_N]

jwenham,XP 32bit manages memory in a completely different manner than Vista x64. That being said, I am not suprised that the "tweak" did not work in your case.

It was resolved.. I helped him tune USERVA to the correct level for his system (2560 does not work for everyone) and he can use bufferpools now

A number of users *are* experiencing this problem to some degree with FSX however, and with FSX only. So this suggests that even if sound isn't plain "broken" in FSX, the sim itself is "problematic" with regards to sound. More so than any other existing game or sim.I still haven't found a solution. The DPC Latency Checker does a great job of telling me what I already know: Sound doesn't work as it should in FSX. It stays in the green always at the desktop and when running other games, but the bars shoot into the red like a rocket as soon as I start a flight with FSX. All the drivers are up to date etc., so there's nothing more I can do at the "user end" short of decompiling the drivers and try to improve them myself....which I can't.What FSX does differently from other games is the way it loads scenery. Oblivion and Fallout3 also feature large-scale scenery, but the scenery is divided into "zones". As soon as you cross the border into a new zone, the scenery is shifted. Even X-Plane loads scenery in this way by periodically "shifting" the scenery at specific points or intervals. I imagine some systems might experience crackling sound during these "shifts", but not otherwise. On my system, sound never breaks up in those games.FSX on the other hand continuously streams new scenery from the disk and rebuilds near, mid and far distant scenery all the time as you fly. Maybe this constant thrashing of the harddrive and textures being sent across the PCI-E bus is too much for some PCs that handle all other games and apps just fine. That doesn't explain why the problem gets worse over forests and nearly disappears over cities however. :(

It nearly saturates the reserved PCIe buss.. well known about trees and noted by Phil Taylorhttp://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/archive/2008...e-envelope.aspxA fix can be drivers and how they may change how ACPI works with resources on the motherboard between sound and video. Gigabyte issued a BIOS fix and later changed the board design however that was not specifc to FSX as it seems to be an issue noted with newer motherboards and is hit and miss in sound problems. To date I have never had a board which displayed the issue so I have not had anything to work with here in checking the problem out

[Guest rainey06au]

Sorry to chime in late to this thread guys but I just resolved this exact issue with my fresh FSX installation. Thankfully I had a copy of my previous FSX installation .cfg to compare which never had a problem.My fsx.cfg WITH sound crackling[sOUND]AmbientUIMusicVolume=-6.000000SOUND=1SOUND_QUALITY=2SOUND_LOD=0UISound=1AmbientUI=0PrimaryDevice={DEF00000-9C6D-47ED-AAF1-4DDA8F2B5C03}VoiceDevice={DEF00002-9C6D-47ED-AAF1-4DDA8F2B5C03}SOUND_FADER1=0.500000SOUND_FADER2=0.500000SOUND_FADER3=0.500000SOUND_FADER4=0.500000AmbientUIMusic=FSX01My FIXED fsx.cfg WITHOUT sound crackling[sOUND]AmbientUIMusicVolume=-6.000000SOUND=1SOUND_QUALITY=2SOUND_LOD=0UISound=1AmbientUI=0PrimaryDevice={00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}VoiceDevice={00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}So I just replaced this part of my .cfg file and it worked!

[Guest Nils79]

Sorry to chime in late to this thread guys but I just resolved this exact issue with my fresh FSX installation. Thankfully I had a copy of my previous FSX installation .cfg to compare which never had a problem.My fsx.cfg WITH sound crackling[sOUND]AmbientUIMusicVolume=-6.000000SOUND=1SOUND_QUALITY=2SOUND_LOD=0UISound=1AmbientUI=0PrimaryDevice={DEF00000-9C6D-47ED-AAF1-4DDA8F2B5C03}VoiceDevice={DEF00002-9C6D-47ED-AAF1-4DDA8F2B5C03}SOUND_FADER1=0.500000SOUND_FADER2=0.500000SOUND_FADER3=0.500000SOUND_FADER4=0.500000AmbientUIMusic=FSX01My FIXED fsx.cfg WITHOUT sound crackling[sOUND]AmbientUIMusicVolume=-6.000000SOUND=1SOUND_QUALITY=2SOUND_LOD=0UISound=1AmbientUI=0PrimaryDevice={00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}VoiceDevice={00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}So I just replaced this part of my .cfg file and it worked!

How many sound devices do you have, if selecting the default directsound device has solved your problems?{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}=primary sound device=the device you have selected in the windows control panel as your preferred sound device.{DEF00000-9C6D-47ED-AAF1-4DDA8F2B5C03}=Is a GUID which FSX is using for a sound device which is different than the default device

[Lmaire 38]

It hasn't changed anything for me. I still have craking sounds.Lmaire

[Guest rainey06au]

How many sound devices do you have, if selecting the default directsound device has solved your problems?{00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}=primary sound device=the device you have selected in the windows control panel as your preferred sound device.{DEF00000-9C6D-47ED-AAF1-4DDA8F2B5C03}=Is a GUID which FSX is using for a sound device which is different than the default device

Yep it certainly fixed it 100%. No matter what stress test I do in FSX I can't make the sound pop and crackle anymore, where it used to do it constantly around high autogen areas, mainly forests.I'm just using the onboard sound from an ASUS P5Q Pro motherboard. I have a headset attached as well as 5.1 Logitech X530's. I was playing around with my audio connector on my motherboard to my headset jack on my tower case (AC97 or HDA), that is all that I changed since I last had FSX on my computer so I can only imagine the problem arises from that.

[Guest fspilot]

Hello, I had the problem with crackling sound a few days ago. Maybe the solution will work for some of you. I have an Asus motherboard and flashed a BIOS. After BIOS flash I experienced the problem with crackling sound not only in games but also in system. I found a BIOS setting - Plug and play OS disabled. I reeenabled it and from that moment everything working fine. Check in BIOS if Plug and play OS setting is enabled or not. If this is dissabled, it's your problem. Usually happens that if pnp OS is dissabled system assign the same IRQ to sound card and VGA and this cause the whole issue. Hope this help you.

[yankeegolf3 51]

hi,I know it is not FSX related but it seems that there is a crackling sound issue with windows seven. I bought a laptop for my daughter and there was a random crackling sound. The store gave me a new one, same problem. I searched the net and found that plenty of people are having the same issue. There are 32 pages about it on the windows seven forum and counting...The only common factor between all the plagued computers is windows seven. It is a widespread and serious problem and nobody has yet found a solution even the computer gurus of the windows seven forum. I will stay with my trustworthy XP. Is Windows seven another vista style lemon??