[FIXED] Music and Sound stuttering with OpenAL

[Tricky]

Ever since the change to OpenAL I have been experiencing stuttering of the music and sound. I thought this was due to my laptop not being powerful enough. After some searching I discovered others were experiencing this. The fix seems to be to install oalinst.exe which places OpenAL32.dll from Creative in the Windows system folder and then removing the DLL packaged with Oolite.

This is a copy of the file I'm using: oalinst.exe (My Google Drive)

Edit: Forgot to add I'm running on Vista 32bit.

[Pleb]

I haven't had any sound problems but then I'm running Windows 8 64 - bit. Maybe that's the problem the OpenAL dll is 64 bit only?

[Tricky]

The DLL is named OpenAL32.dll in the oolite.app directory so I assume it is the 32 bit version.

[UK_Eliter]

A (thread-resurrecting question): should I install the OpenAl driver separately? Or does Oolite install everything the game needs, sound-wise? Sorry if this has been asked before somewhere.

I am on Windows x64, using a trunk build, with an ATI video card.

Thanks.

[another_commander]

A (thread-resurrecting question): should I install the OpenAl driver separately? Or does Oolite install everything the game needs, sound-wise? Sorry if this has been asked before somewhere.

I am on Windows x64, using a trunk build, with an ATI video card.

Thanks.

Oolite installs everything that is required and you should not have to install any external drivers or libraries. Are you experiencing any sound problems (stutters, distortions etc.) with OpenAL?

[UK_Eliter]

Thanks, another_commander.

I am not having any problems; it's just that a driver updater programme - one of the less dubious ones, but in a beta version - recommended that I install an OpenAL driver (and I doubt that the updater programme made the recommendation because it detected Oolite on my computer).

[another_commander]

In the last few days I had the chance to play around with a Windows Vista 32-bit laptop with a Realtek sound card and saw this problem. After some investigation, it looks like the actual issue might be with the non-Creative Labs sound cards rather than the OS. In any case, a solution has been found.

Anyone experiencing sound distortion and stutter with Oolite can try this fix as an alternative to installing the OpenAL32.dll linked in the first post. If this solution works for everyone the same way it worked for me I would prefer it. The reason is that OpenAL32.dll, just like every other support DLL Oolite uses, is built specifically for Oolite and quite a few times we apply fixes directly to the support DLLs in order to get them to do things the way they are meant to be for the game - or sometimes even improve them over the "standard" versions. Using an external DLL adds a barrier to proper game support in case of need.

So, the fix:
1. Start a command prompt and execute the below line to determine the actual location of %APPDATA% on your computer:

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echo %APPDATA%

In my case, APPDATA was located at C:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Roaming.
2. Now navigate to that folder with Windows explorer and create a new empty text file (right click -> New => Text Document).
3. Open the empty text file in an editor and add this one line in it:

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frequency = 16000

4. Now save this file as alsoft.ini and make sure that no extensions like .txt or anything else gets added automatically by the OS.

You are done. Start up Oolite and hopefully enjoy non-distorted, beautiful positional sounds.

[another_commander]

Just today I realized that the 32-bit OpenAL32.dll was not built with DirectSound backend support on Windows and only the winmm backend was available. A new, updated OpenAL32.dll for 32-bit Windows has been uploaded to github and will be in from tomorrow's nightly onwards. This resolves completely the issue of distorted sounds in some 32-bit systems and the alsoft.ini fix mentioned above will be no longer necessary. Please report any issues you may encounter with the new DLL.

The 64-bit flavor of OpenAL32.dll is already built (correctly) with DirectSound backend support, so there is no change for 64-bit systems.