SB Live! Sound Problems (DirectSound?)

[NooNoo]

I have been having directsound problems with one particular kids game.... the final cure after tinkering with drivers, changing the sound card etc?

Redownload and reinstall dx9 - grrrr problems allllll gone away now....

[confus-ed]

..Redownload and reinstall dx9 - grrrr problems allllll gone away now....

So you actually (that word again !) mean that you had directx9 (that comes with xp), & then windows update probably mussed it up a bit & gave you directx 9.0a & you finally cured it by getting directx 9.0b ?
(for clarity the build number showing on my xp beastie is 4.09.0000.0902 - on the dxdiag.exe generated page - the update component has been known to 'misfire' & sometimes you need to get it all ..)

Worth a shot from over here anyway, despite my 'teasing'

[NooNoo]

no this was a 98 box... my kids like dos games! It was uptodate with dx9 per windows update - I think that probably another game cd tried to update dx and screwed up one tiny corner of it.

[Jinded]

I've reinstalled DirectX 9, but it didn't help.

[confus-ed]

Just what's not working now ? .. we seem to have cured a couple of things, but as per I'm now confus-ed as to just what's still wrong - exactly

[Jinded]

I think at the moment it's just that after a certain amount of time playing a game, it starts making loud crackling noises that don't stop until I quit the game.

[confus-ed]

I virtually said this before & what you are telling me 'extra/clarifying' seems to confirm it more - These are s/w cards, no hardware acceleration, push it or the cpu or have the pci bus real busy & this is what you'll get, try whipping your screen resolution down for a bit & see if my 'theory' holds water, if we get no crackles etc, then there you go, gotta turn something down a bit to get it to play right or keep playing 'hunt a better' codec ..

Oh edit:

For completeness, we covered bloatware a bit (or I did a lot!) - but there's also that evil Soundblaster resident proggie - devldr32.exe, besides all the ct 'whatever' ones - is that floating about anywhere ? Windows update just reloaded me it with my version of this card & I just deleted the useless thing again ! Makes all my games run 'pants' ..

[Jinded]

Well, I doubt the problem comes from pushing my hardware, since I have a Radeon 9700 and am running the game on low settings at 800x600, only because in very rare occasions, when fighting 6 people at once, the frame rate gets a bit choppy. Most of the time the game is 1v1 and I get smooth framerate. Actually, that reminds me, when I play games, I set the video card to overclock itself by about 10% (276/270 to 295/290). I know overclocking can cause some problems, so I'll try the game without OC. Also, I do have that devldr32.exe running, so I'll get rid of that as well and see what difference it makes.

[Jinded]

How do I go about deleting devldr32.exe? Every time I delete it, it recreates itself and loads itself into memory again.

[confus-ed]

How do I go about deleting devldr32.exe? Every time I delete it, it recreates itself and loads itself into memory again.

It's a real pain to get rid of & NOT a procedure for everyone to try .. its a bit of middleware for direct x & is referenced by the driver inf (provides all those 'funky' sound effects, I don't think a sb live card is 'really' up to) .. so you need to edit that, turn off system restore, delete all the actual file instances of it you might have, delete the main part of the device in device manager, install your edited inf by right clicking it, & that should be it .. (then turn system restore back on) - & even all of that isn't always sucessful ! It drives me nuts !

Try for now just zapping it via task manager & temporarily renaming it, before attempting what is somewhat of a 'dubious' procedure, if you can tell its 'better' then that's maybe an answer & worth all the trouble, if not, then I didn't make you make a 'cock' of your system without any potential benefit. (I'm happy doing this level of 'tinkering' with my system - but not so happy advising others to do so - so don't say I didn't warn you)

I have a real feeling of deja vu with this next bit ..

Its all very well saying 'I have a high powered system' & why is 'pushing hardware' the issue ? because the card is SOFTWARE based NOT HARDWARE ACCELERATED is why (its got hardware to accelerate EAX but not everything) - run your dx diags & it says so - no 'true' Hardware acceleration with these puppies, so if the game makes a dx9 hardware call that isn't there then that's all got to come from the card, down your pci bus, in & out of both the cpu & memory, back up the pci bus & back into your card, your AGP which is probably going at least 2x or 4x or maybe more fast (AGP 1x is twice the pci bus speed, so if your 9700 is running at 8x it can outpace the pci bus by 16x !) has meanwhile drawn a zillion frames all with 'deep' sound that also need catching up with ..

If games came so that you could 'twiddle' with sound as well as you generally can with video options you wouldn't get this, else get a dx9 Hardware accelerated card to match your dx9 video or you can play 'hunt the codec somemore' (codecs being either s/w or hardware translators) which can match the processing demands of sound to the power of your video ..

[Jinded]

I tried a few things to get rid of devldr32.exe but the file kept recreating itself, so I created a blank text document and saved it as devldr32.exe in my WINDOWS\System 32 directory. I can't tell if it had much effect on the audio yet, I'll get back to you later about that. By the way, my Radeon is running at AGP 4x.

[Spork]

Yeah, I have this problem with my system too.

My system specs;

AMD Athlon 2400XP
Chaintech 7NJS motherboard (Nvidia chipset)
512 MB DDR-RAM
GeForce 3
SB Audigy LS
40 WD Raptor hard drive

The only time I experience the problem is with Battlefield 1942. I've installed the game, the latest patch (1.06) and even the Road To Rome expansion. I seem to always have the problem. Sometimes after starting and exiting the game a couple times, I can get the game to "mostly" run, but I'll still experience problems inbetween missions with the music. If I disable my sound card, the game will run flawless... but I won't have any sound.

It's frustrating.