Crackly audio and other oddness in OpenAL soft

[princec]

Got a lot of reports about the audio in Revenge of the Titans being "crackly". I could never reproduce it on my system (Vista64, i7). Still, there's no smoke without a fire.

Then a similar thing started happening at work now (we're using LWJGL2.4.2 at work as well). Basically, streaming audio plays fine until something else plays some audio. Not anything - just some things. WinAmp, for example, doesn't hurt streaming OpenAL at all. But simply playing a Windows sound like the system beep causes audio to crackle badly, as if one of the little audio buffers were getting snatched away from OpenAL without it knowing, and thus rendering silence (which sounds like crackling).

Anybody got any thoughts or experiences on this?

Cas

[kappa]

LWJGL (including 2.4.2) has been using a very old version of OpenAL-Soft. Since then OpenAL-Soft has got millions of bug fixes and features added to it.

Recently LWJGL's build farm has added support for OpenAL-Soft so it compiles latest nightly builds of OpenAL-Soft.

You should give the new OpenAL-Soft a try as there has been tons of fixes and its likely the 'crackly' sound issue has been fixed.

I'm not sure if OpenAL-Soft builds are integrated with the LWJGL nightly yet but its pretty simple to try it (just the drop the new binaries over the old ones)

[princec]

Oooh brilliant, I just grabbed the Win32 OpenAL build from the OpenAL-soft site and the audio issues here at work just went away. Fingers cross Revenge of the Titans will see similar behaviour, thus clearing up about 25 support issues in one go!

Cas