Static/crackling sound

[The Zohan]

Bought this game on sale this weekend, and I was super stoked to play it. A soon as I load up though, the game has cracking sound and nothing is audible besides the static. I did a little research and found others with similar problems, but I didn't find any solutions that worked. Anyone have ideas on how to fix this?

[RiikkaFB]

Sorry to hear about this! This does sound weird.

You could try verifying the game files or reinstalling the game, in case something went wrong with the installation. If that doesn't help, you could also try updating your drivers.

If you have multiple sound devices connected (like speakers and headphones) you could also try disconnecting the ones you're not currently using, in case that makes a difference.

If the problem persists, could you answer the below questions? They might help us look into this and find a solution. :)

• Is the static sound continuous (in all levels all the time) or only in certain levels or certain parts of the levels? If it's only at certain parts, please mention which parts.
  
• Is the sound also present in the playable Main Menu of the game, or only once you load a level?
  
• What is your operating system and other system information?

You also mentioned other similar problems; were they with this same game? We haven't really heard of other similar issues, so if they're connected to our games and you still have the links to these mentions, we wouldn't mind taking a look at them. :)

I hope this helped. :) Let me know how it goes!

[The Zohan]

Thanks for the prompt reply, I didn't expect anything so fast.

I have tried reinstalling, and I tried isolating several sound devices as well. This includes using the onboard sound card, a DAC, as well as headphones and speakers. The static is persistent as soon as the game starts up and throughout gameplay.

I did notice that as soon as you exit the game, the last bit of audio is normal. This is like a quarter of a second at most, just the noise for confirming exiting the game I believe.

As for similar problems here is the only link I could find offhand;

https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/3/846939071106196740/

I picked up quite a few games this weekend, so I'm not in any rush to fix this. I'm sure it's something relatively simple.

[RiikkaFB]

Sorry to hear that didn't work. Thanks for linking the other thread! Unfortunately we must have somehow missed that before, since this issue still sounds new to me.

You didn't mention your operating system, is it a Linux distro? Your other system information might be helpful to know as well. Did you try updating your drivers or possibly even another drivers? Do the other games you picked up work fine?

Our QA can try to look into this once we know a bit more about your system. :)

[The Zohan]

My bad, Windows 7. I don't overclock anything normally. Drivers are all up to date, I even rolled back audio and video drivers to try that.

i-7 2600k
16 GB DDR3
GTX titan

Never had an issue like this, rarely ever have any issues at all. Usually I can fix them in a matter of minutes, this one has me stumped though. I've been building my own computers since the 90's so I know my way around pretty good.

Is there anything unique about how Trine or Trine2 handle audio? Both have this same issue. I tried changing sound settings in every possible way I can think of, audio quality, speaker setup, you name it. I have not tried modifying game files.

[RavenWolf]

Do you got problems in any other games? You got GTX Titan. What power supply do you got?

[The Zohan]

Power supply is a 750w Corsair I believe. Never had any issues related to the card, at least not that were evident. Also never had any issues with the power supply. Thanks for the interest btw, any help is welcome. Still have yet to make any progress here.

[JLarja]

Trine 2 and Trine EE are using Wwise (as can be seen from credits) and we are not intentionally doing anything special or weird. I've had myself some crackling issues when running some background processes that fully (or nearly fully) utilize all cores and having hyper-threading enabled. Though this isn't really a solution, you could try disabling hyper-threading just to see if that helps. Of course, if you know you have some CPU heavy background tasks running, you can start by disabling those.

-JLarja

[The Zohan]

Thanks for the idea, I'll give that some more in depth analysis to see if I can figure it out. I'm not intentionally doing anything CPU intenstive, but it's possible. I might try running it in a VM too, see if that has any effect. Haven't had to do that since I tried playing synidcate wars lol.

[JoelFB]

Just to add - what JLarja said basically - the first Trine has both the original version of the game and the Enchanted Edition available, and the original version uses Fmod instead of Wwise for audio. In the game Launcher you can choose to play the original instead of the Enchanted Edition. It's a different code base though, so it's not that helpful in solving the actual problem, but all info is good.

And just to cover all bases, you could try running the games on the integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000 GPU instead of the Titan. Maybe there's a weird driver glitch going on.

The settings files for the games can be found in %APPDATA%\Trine and %APPDATA%\Trine2\ if you want to mess with the audio options there.

[The Zohan]

Joel, I took what you said into account, and sure enough the original edition worked like a charm. Nice to be able to finally enjoy the game, which is awesome by the way. I'll continue looking into the problem I am having with Wwise and post the fix when/if I find it. Well, at least I'm fairly confident the problem is there.