Audio crackling in Ambient Sounds placed in levels

Development Audio
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1

Hi,

My team and I are experiencing quite a bit of audio crackling in 4.18. We did not have this issue in 4.16, it’s only since upgrading to 4.18 have we started hearing the crackle in music and general sounds. Is there a method of debugging this or is this a known issue?

To note: This is happening in both the PC and Xbox One versions of the title.

Thanks,
Jon

2

Hello ZeJudge,

I am unable to reproduce the issue you are experiencing. I have a couple of questions about your issue to help narrow down the issue you are experiencing.

  1. Can you reproduce this issue in a new project?
  2. If so could you provide a detailed list of steps so that I can reproduce this issue on our end?
  3. Did you upgrade your project directly from 4.16 to 4.18?

Thanks!

3

Hi ,

I’m the sound designer on this project and I can add a bit more information regarding this issue. On Windows there is an audible crackle every 20-25 seconds, but it happens more frequently on Xbox and PS4.

We thought we had a fix by converting the audio files from 48khz (the default sample rate that we were using for most things) down to 44.1khz as this seemed to work in a new project but in actual fact it hasn’t made a noticeable difference. I’ve also reduced the dialogue, ambience and foley files to 22khz but it still hasn’t made any difference to the crackling issue.
I’ve also tried setting some sounds to streaming and have tried adjusting the virtual voice settings but still no joy.

This is not only an issue on gameplay maps where there are many sounds playing but also on the main menu screen where there are only 3 sounds playing so I don’t think it’s got anything to do with us maxing out on voices.
We’ve tried increasing the callback buffer size but again this has made no difference.

As Jon said, the audio was working fine until we made the transition to (to answer your question we did go to 4.17 first) 4.18 so I suspect that something is happening in the code that is causing this issue.
The fact that it consistently happens every 20-25 seconds on Windows is making me think that perhaps it is a buffer-related issue? At the moment though I’m open to suggestions for things to try or for possible causes as nothing I’ve done with the assets seems to have made any difference. I’m well and truly stumped!

Thanks,

4

Hello ,

I have a couple more questions to help me investigate this issue further.

  1. Does this happen with every audio sample in your project?
  2. To clarify, this issue is not occurring for you in a new project?
  3. How are you calling sounds to play? Through C++ code or through blueprints?

Thanks!

5

Hello,

We have not heard back from you in a few days, so we are marking this post as Resolved for tracking purposes. If you are still experiencing the issue you reported, please respond to this message with additional information and we will follow up.

Thanks,

6

Hi , I’m currently experiencing crackling sounds on xbox one in my 4.18 project.

Moreover, sometimes our game crashes due to an assertion failed in XMAAudioInfo.cpp line 232
verify(SUCCEEDED(SetShapeXmaInputBuffer0(XmaContext, XmaDataPhysical)));

Do you have some info on why this issue is happening?