Sound is Borked! D:

[Elizinator]

beginning yesterday, with apparently no cause, my sound in skyrim is . . . misbehaving. i first noticed it in a draugr dungeon, where in combat, my sound effects would be significantly delayed and erratic. at first i thought it was script lag, but all scripted events went off on-time and successfully, and there was no stuttering or crashing. npc dialogue cuts out or is drowned in static, as are most other sounds.

 

i have loaded multiple old saves which preceded the advent of the problem, but they too have strange behaviours. in most of them, sounds simply do not exist, such as melee impact noises (but not injury grunts), sword sheathing noises (but not UNsheathing), some spell effects, etc. there is no rhyme or reason to what does or does not play.

 

i have tried everything i can think of. this occurred without me installing or un-installing anything and without changing any in-game settings. i have also tried updating codecs, and nothing has made the slightest difference. however, i do have Realtek sound, which i hear is known for problems, but i cannot find any solution to those problems.

 

any ideas? D:

[Elizinator]

weird update,

 

after updating drivers didnt help at all, i decided to roll back and just use the default drivers from windows. and things really improved, but the problem did not go away. it just got less severe =/

[Elizinator]

halp? D:

[NamelessRogue]

In your skyrim.ini under audio make sure this line reads

uMaxSizeForCachedSound=4096

 

this should automatically be done if your using either the unofficial Skyrim patch or the newer all in one legendary patch. Otherwise blame realtek I had a realtek sound driver on my old XP machine and updating the driver was extremely problematic. Best bet is to probably try to get help on a technical site like realtek, toms hardware, Windows forums, etc

[Elizinator]

ill give that a try. in my .ini, there was no heading for sound at all D:

 

and yeah, im using all the unofficial patches. ill change over to the legendary patch when i start a new playthrough.

[Elizinator]

didnt work. at all :C

 

still crackle, delay, absence, etc. sound is borked D:

[NamelessRogue]

I think its your realtek driver. I remember what happened when i updated my driver .. i finally got it to work somehow .. but microphone never worked again.

[Elizinator]

so youre telling me that a hope and a prayer is my only hope and prayer? :C

 

i have no idea where this came from, but it pretty clearly implicates realtek. might it be solved by an off-board sound card?

[Elizinator]

cant get anything to work. sound is borked in every direction, no matter how many times i remove or reinstall drivers,

 

crackling, absent sounds, distortion, delay. same as always.

 

anyone know how to deal with realtek drivers? or if that is even the actual problem? D:

[NamelessRogue]

Remove the driver you installed (from realtek website)  ... and reboot system (default windows driver should be installed at reboot if not then this is a problem). Find your motherboard model and specs, download from motherboard / manufacturer website not realtek.  newest chipset , and audio driver for your MB. 

[Elizinator]

nope. that made it way, way worse.

 

EDIT: curiouser and curiouser. i found that audiodg.exe was taking up a lot of processor time, and google recommended i disable all audio enhancements. so i did. and nothing improved, except for the cpu usage. sound remained borked.

 

so i fiddled with other settings, and only one made a difference: setting it to stereo instead of 5.1 improved things considerably. didnt fix it, but made it less severe >_>

 

. . . weird.

[NamelessRogue]

If you got rid of the old drivers hopefully you did. reinstall the audio drivers from your Motherboard driver disk. then update from MSI update (the download and update button not just download)

and don't mess with windows programs eg audiodg.exe

 

make a account on here and ask there tomshardware.com

 

[WhiteSteelMan]

I've been having this issue everytime I reinstalled game since 2011. Never got it fixed. On 3 completely different pc configurations!!

 

OFFTOPIC

Decided to come back with new system. Runs witcher 3 at 50fps. It never went under 45 in most intense areas.

Now I have some serious framerate issues with skyrim. My old 5750 had better fps in towns on vanilla, 7870 with mods gave me 40fps in towns and around 35 outside. Now I'm getting sub 30 in towns and extreme random fps outside on R9 390 with minimal texture mods. Even without enb the performance is horrible.

[Elizinator]

I FOUND THE PROBLEM!

 

it was the mod "Fire and Ice Overhaul". i thought it might be this when one mention of it appeared in my searches, but i was pretty reluctant to remove a script mod, and i wasnt getting the papyrus log spam that some others complained of. however, during a dragon attack which involved many pillars of fire, my sound cut out almost entirely, replaced by roaring static. that seemed like reasonably strong evidence that FIO was at fault. i removed it, re-ASIS'd, loaded up, and sure enough, all delay and static is gone!