World of Warcraft Forum

Everything appears to be running great in 9.2.1

However, now the only issue I have is that sound cuts out often - not always - when I try to run a media player in the background or use mangler as a ventrillo alternative. Sounds great when it is working.

The sound also cuts out, but only occasionally, during intense fighting (Tol Barard) or in Org during peak times.

My temp solution in game is to go into the WOW sound settings and toggle the "use harware" switch. Everything freezes for about 5-7 seconds and sound is back.

I'm using 2x screens with nvidia card. Fully updated drivers. I have "sound in background" enabled. I also have ALSA and OSS audio switched in the Winecfg. I have internal audio and an Audigy2 both seem to have the same issue.

Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your time.

Hi,

I'd probably suspect pulseaudio if you have it installed/running.
If the Audigy is your primary soundcard (hw:0,0), you don't need
pulseaudio at all (the audigy has hardware mixers) - I'm pretty
sure there's threads in the Ubuntu support forums on how to cleanly
disable or remove pulseaudio. Else, you might try experimenting with
the Audio options in the Wine Configuration GUI..

Cheers!

I agree with don, the only thing i would add is make sure your running the wineconfig set to win2k or devices are not detected and supported properly.
Also i have a soundblaster x-fi extreme gamer and still have this problem in windows sometimes.

This appears to have been a resource issue.
I upgraded to 4G of memory and after 2 days of play it appears to be working well.

i didn't know that. i was using alsa and pulseaudio with my soundblaster x-fi extreme gamer, i knew you could make some changes but i was sure you needed pulse or alsa for the sound as a software wrapper while using wine.

also i had this problem along time ago and i cant remember what i did to fix it.

alan howell wrote:

This appears to have been a resource issue.
I upgraded to 4G of memory and after 2 days of play it appears to be
working well.

Good to hear you had a win - I suppose it's possible that lack of ram could cause
this sort of thing (depends on what the app's doing) as the wine core will tell
the program it has 3gb to play with (I think that's the number) - that'd be a bad
idea if you only had 2gb of ram 8)

Cheers!

dablackfox wrote:

i didn't know that. i was using alsa and pulseaudio with my
soundblaster x-fi extreme gamer, i knew you could make some changes
but i was sure you needed pulse or alsa for the sound as a software
wrapper while using wine.

also i had this problem along time ago and i cant remember what i
did to fix it.

This, is the thing that annoys me about pulseaudio - it gets installed by default ; no
attempt is made to interrogate the hardware at install time to determine if one actually
needs it - even if you have both onboard sound and a 'real' soundcard active, you don't
really need PA (you just use the single mixer of the onboard chipset and patch the output
to line-in of your 'real' soundcard)...

...PA was implemented for one reason and one reason alone afaict - crappy onboard sound
chipsets that don't include hardware mixer elements (in the silicon). As we know, pretty
much all motherboards now ship with onboard sound and to keep production costs down, they
don't bother using a (more expensive) chipset (with hardware mixers) - it really is that
simple. As it's installed by default, it's created this mindset in people that PA is 'good',
'mandatory' or some sort of 'desirable feature' - this is not the case.

Btw, in the last decade (while my son was still at home growing up ;), Windows had exactly
the same issues with games & onboard sound. In the Windows case, the software mixers are
part of the soundcard drivers (not as a tertiary app like PA is)...not that it matters,
as the effective solution was to disable onboard sound and put in a $20 emu10k1 instead,
and then all the crashes/problems literally disappeared. Unfortunately speaking, mobo
manufacturers nowadays aren't exactly generous with spare PCI/PCIe slots, and so for
many folks (who buy 'budget' motherboards) the option to add another soundcard is not
always viable - they have some other card(s) in the spare slots...

...if I'm right, the alsa sound drivers will eventually incorporate the software mixers
into that driver layer -- I'm not sure if that would remedy any issues perse, but it
would kill off PA in quick fashion (at least, I really hope so 8)

Hi all!

When installing Cataclysm, I had to set the Bottle to WinXP for the Installation...
After that, sound was missing in the game completely! (interestingly not in the Launcher)

After reseting the Bottle to Win2000, sound returned and everything is fine now!

My System:

Fedora 14 i386
CXGames 10