Sound issues

[marrow]

Greetings all!

I blew the dust off my STW: Warlord Edition yesterday because I could not contain my M2TW-induced frustration any longer.
OMG forgot how good and true STW really is! In my heart it still stands as the best one in the whole series. I nearly welled up when first battle loaded but when I finally broke Uesugi line and killed the general, the game froze for a couple of secs and produced a couple of squeaks and static-like burbles instead of usual "...but his dishonour and our swords will chase him to his grave!". The same happens in the throne room, when a heir is born, when faction gets destroyed etc, in either japanese or english, not sure what's causing it, especially that the game itself runs very well. Battlefield commands, sounds and music all work fine. Any ideas please?

Does anyone still play STW on MP? 'spect

[marrow]

Eh, feel like such a fool as I should have checked the stickies, my apologies, if required please move my post to stickies or remove it.

However, I have checked all posts in the relevant thread (installation issues on new comp) and I followed advice there to no avail. My mp3's are defaulted to WMP and play without any problems in WMP itself, issue only appears to persist ingame. Dunno, if you have any ideas other than posted in the sticky, please share! Many thanks and again - apologies!

[caravel]

Post your system specs. The problem may be related to sound card drivers if it's just a stutter problem and not a full on crash.

[marrow]

AMD64 X2 4800+
Creative Sound Blaster Live X-Fi and latest drivers
ATI Radeon x1600pro 512MB and lastest drivers (video is fine tho).

I do have an AVI codec pack and a Multimedia Processor installed too.
Could that be the culprit?

Thanks for response, Caravel

[caravel]

Have you tried adjusting the sound quality? Try low/medium/high and see if it makes any difference.

Check which is your default media player, I'm guessing this is not the issue, but STW/MTW seem to work best if WMP is the default media player.

I'm not sure about the codecs you've installed but, someone correct me, I think the STW videos are in fact AVI's?? So any changes to the AVI codecs could conceivably affect the videos in some way. This would explain the sound problem in the throne room but not the in battle sound problems! This is what leads me to believe that codecs may not be the issue.

Run dxdiag and check the status of your directX componets, especially Directsound. Test DirectSound and fiddle with the hardware acceleration slider and see if that makes any difference.

And finally, I hate to suggest this but, do you have a disabled onboard sound chip or another old soundcard lying about? If so you might want to try removing your card and trying one of these alternatives. This would rule out the sound card being the cuplrit instantly. If the problem disappears then you'll know what the problem is.

Note: If you do decide to try this then make sure you know what you're doing, take anti static precautions when handling electro static sensitive equipment and remember that it is neither mine nor the .org's fault if it all goes wrong and you end up with a smouldering crispy heap that used to be a computer on your hands. In general if you didn't build that machine yourself or have no experience of building or upgrading PC's, installing and swapping device drivers then don't bother with this.

[marrow]

Caravel,

Format used for in-game vids is in fact .mpg, I made sure that WMP is the default media player too

I don't have a spare sound card lying around either... Ironically I work in IT but our desktops only have onboard cards.

Thanks very much for your advice, mate, especially your safety tips! I'm more or less on the ball AFA handling hardware (even got that little earthing-clip bracelet at home - geek!), but you never know.

Kudos for keeping the forum alive mate, good to know not everyone has forgotten STW!

I'll muck about with sound quality settings and see what comes up.

Thanks again!