Sound problems on the high seas

[newbravado]

I haven't played SD1 in awhile and thought I'd try SD2, I mean PotC. Picked it up for $20 bucks. The game seems to play fine. Hasn't crashed yet. But the sound!! What the...? muffled and static, lotsa static. I was thinking it has something to do with directX 9. Not sure. I tested it out with GTA3 and the sound is fine.

I've been to every message board I could fine looking for a similar problem, but no dice. Am I the only one on the simulated seas with this problem?

I have a sound blaster live 5.1
Creatives auto update says I have the latest driver.
I have a 1 ghz with 256megs ram and a geforce4 4200

 

[Ravenheart]

Hmm it shold sound fine im with onboard sound and it is very good.Maybe if you reinstall the game this will fix.

 

[NathanKell]

In config, is safe mode for sound on?

 

[rommel5]

I am, or should I say was newbravado, but I couldn't log on to the message board with that name for some reason : Error screen would tell me that name expired, or something like that. I just registered yesterday!

Anyways, thanks for the responses. I have turned off the safe mode in the config and it made no difference.

I will try again to update to directX 9.0b see if that helps.
Maybe just `re-install` the game. see what will work.

 

[NathanKell]

Hmmm...I seem to recall that a lot of people have had trouble with SB Lives and POTC. You can try doing a search on the old PA forum (available from the mainpage).
Though until a couple weeks ago I had an SB Live, and never had a problem...then again I was using truly /ancient/ drivers for it...

 

[rommel5]

Problem solved

I removed the drivers and `re-installed` them from the CD that came with the soundblaster live card and walla! success. I must have been using drivers from windows 98 or God knows where and they just weren't up to snuff.

I knew it was on my end since I was the only one whining. Thanks for your help.

Now I want to learn about these mods I've read about.

Thanks again.

 

[moetman]

Hey rommel5, I'm having the same prob! so reinstall the SB live from the cd you say ? hmm I'll give it a try

 

[Praylak]

Hiss, crack, popple.

I've spent more time on this issue than I would care to say. Anyway, for the next poor sap that goes looking for this answer, I can verify that the drivers are infact the problem.

SBlive 5.1 users have an option of installing V or WDM sound drivers. When using the orignal installation disc, it will prompt you for which type to use. For the longest time I used the V drivers, but PoTC doesn't seem to care for them because the overall quality was terrible with them. I was quite surprised at the difference in sound quality when I installed the WDM drivers.

 

[NathanKell]

SB Live has _crap_ drivers IMO.
I stayed with the _original_ W2K drivers I found for it, because _any_ newer drivers gave me nothing but trouble.
But six months back I switched to nforce2 SoundStorm, and I've been a happy camper. :huh

 

[Praylak]

Creative cabbage

I would have to agree, but I think the real problem is the lack of support for the drivers in general. For the most part I have been happy with the card, but it's crap support that they have as it's only been revised once and that was years ago. At last for Win 9x OS. I will be dumping Creative on the next sound card purchase. Hardware needs regular support and new drivers to follow as software is forever changing.

 

[McCoy]

Well, I had some problems regarding performance since I switched to windows XP with a lot of games (I have SB Live! 1024 wich is the same as 5.1 I think), but I downloaded the latest Windows XP drivers and now everything works quite fine. But, the process for finding the right driver is a bit tricky, if my memory doesn't fail, there was a lot of versions, depending of the version you had installed before, you had to check some dlls at system32 to know wich version you had and download the new version accordingly and so on. BTW, I didn't have any problem with the sound in PotC