Horrible audio crackling, tried every online tip.

[Mr.Mech]

I have bought the game with every expansion yesterday, having been a massive fan of the X series since before 2007.

And now here I am positively heartbroken, because for whatever reason, no matter what I do the sound is stuttering/crackling/♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ itself if anything happens.

It began very well, with first startup producing no sound whatsoever, on any selectable audio devices. Then I hit the "reset to default" in the settings, and that gave me the cracking audio. After that I started looking for solutions.

I usually have my headsets bitrate at the maximum of 24bit 192000 Hz (don't ask why), and I was advised to lower it to 24bit 44100 Hz, which does make the game generally not crackle, but if anything mildly loud happens, it is worse than before, not to mention that everything in general sounds low quality.

I have updated every driver I could possibly find on my PC (even my mouse), validated files, redownload a microsoft redistributable containing the openAL32.dll file, since I have played Stalker Anomaly a while back, and I've seen people with my exact problem referring to that, but that game has not been on my pc for months.

I haven't the faintest idea why this is going on, as nothing of this sort has ever happened, and everything still works perfectly fine.

I have minimal software/hardware knowledge and am mostly just following tutorials and instructions, so if anyone can help, please explain everything like I'm an idiot.

My PC specs are the following:
CPU: Intel I5-8600k
Motherboard: Asus TUF 370-plus gaming
GPU: Gigabyte Geforce RTX 2070 windforce 8G
Memory: 16x2Gb ddr4 3200MHz


Thanks to anyone in advance.

[n0kturnal]

same problem

[8377 Rose]

Hi, I've got X4 on GOG and had this issue- the following discussion has the solution in it!! Hope you're still around to see this/still play.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/392160/discussions/0/4772129115120091113

I'm necroposting this because this thread popped up when I was searching for a solution, lol, and lost my mind when I saw /no/ solution. Hours of digging later, I found that solution, and am posting it here for OP and anyone else who had the same issue.

[Daemonjax]

See if there's a system-wide openalsoft config file on your pc somewhere and rename it... probably somewhere in %AppData%