Sound effects play back differently between GZDoom versions

[_mental_]

This difference seems to related to FMOD settings. Could you please post your values from Sound Options -> FMOD Options menu?

[Nevander]

These are from 2.2.0:

Underwater Cutoff: 250
Output System: Default
Output Format: 16-bit
Speaker Mode: Auto
Resampler: Linear
HRTF Filter: Off
Buffer Size: Default
Buffer Count: Default

[Graf Zahl]

Any new info here?

[_mental_]

Nope, there is no single good or bad version. The issue seems to be quite timing dependent. Playing with FMOD settings affects it significantly too.
I think raw sound output needs to be saved and analyzed in external tool like Audacity. It's futile endeavor (at least for me) to find something out just by hearing.
All that I can say is plasma rifle and chaingun sound differently indeed. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it's not.

[Nash]

I've mentioned this briefly a while ago but is it possible to get get a raw wave output dumper in GZDoom? I can run through the waveforms in spectral analyzers and other audio tools to try and find the problem.

My previous method of capturing audio from GZDoom was flawed (extracting the audio stream from a FRAPS recording - ack!)

[_mental_]

No, there is no such feature at the moment.

FMOD has an output that writes wave files but it wasn't used in (G)ZDoom.
Probably something similar exists in OpenAL Soft.
It's possible to save raw output to a file with OpenAL Soft.

Create alsoft.ini file in GZDoom folder with the following content

Code: Select all

drivers=wave
[wave]
file=output.wav

Sound and music will be saved to output.wav file in the same folder.
Delete/rename alsoft.ini to switch to regular sound output.

[Chris]

With OpenAL Soft, you can configure it to use a wave writer backend that provides a device that writes output to a standard .wav file, as _mental_ describes (it can also be done through the alsoft-config GUI app, which is just a front-end to setting those options).

For dumping the wave output as it plays back normally though, not currently. There is a defined extension that would allow it (AL_EXT_FOLDBACK), but it's not currently implemented in OpenAL Soft. It's something I hope to have in for 1.19 though.

[Silentdarkness12]

I've encountered a similar problem while testing out Hideous Destructor with the latest dev build.



The sounds seem to get clipped or cut off, as if there's only like one or two sound channels, even though sound channels in audio are cranked all the way up to maximum.

[Graf Zahl]

That doesn't mean much. There's two kinds of channels: The physical ones in the sound backend and the actor channels. If you play two sounds on the same actor channel they will cut off each other.

[Silentdarkness12]

That doesn't mean much. There's two kinds of channels: The physical ones in the sound backend and the actor channels. If you play two sounds on the same actor channel they will cut off each other.

Thing is, if you pick the current stable release and run with it, the sounds DON'T cut each other off, though. So something's changed in the dev builds that's making the sounds cut each other off when they're not supposed to.

[Graf Zahl]

Please swap the OpenAL DLL's and check how that affects playback. Also, what GZDoom binary are you using? 32 bit? 64 bit, or Linux?

[phantombeta]

From what I can see, the dev builds' OpenAL DLL has FINALLY been updated. (7-zip it's the DLL was last modified September 2017 now)
I also can't reproduce this bug. I've tested this with both the slightly outdated OpenAL DLL from 3.4.1 that you packaged incorrectly and with the September 2017 one from the dev builds, and neither of them do this.

(Running 64-bit GZDoom builds on Windows 10 version 1709, testing with the latest release of Hideous Destructor)

[Silentdarkness12]

I swapped the DLL and no sound played because it was incompatible. Yeah, what phantom said.

[A_D_M_E_R_A_L]

Well here I am discovering a similar issue between 4.7.1 and recently dropped 4.8.0. Only in my case it's the volume of some sounds being louder than normal. Swapped the DLL files from 4.7.1 and no volume issues. The culprit is the OpenAL DLL file.

[Chris]

Well here I am discovering a similar issue between 4.7.1 and recently dropped 4.8.0. Only in my case it's the volume of some sounds being louder than normal. Swapped the DLL files from 4.7.1 and no volume issues. The culprit is the OpenAL DLL file.

What sounds? Vanilla sounds, or modded ones, and if the latter, from what mods?