Get a "crackling" sound during MaxPayne, but not with anything else...

[MichaelD]

This has been bugging me for awhile. When I play MP, I get a constant crackling noise...almost like bubble wrap popping thru all four speakers. It's kind of in the background, but it's annoying. ALL other games, CDs, MP3s, Wavs, play just fine. Only happens w/MP> Any ideas?

 

[BD231]

I find that turning on surround sound can cause this sometimes, just try screwing around with sound settings and trouble shoot. If your using an SBLive! that could be it, try updating drivers and all that.

 

[MichaelD]

I hate my SBLIVE...but what else is there? Onboard sound is a no-no. AFAIK, I have the latest driver in there (driver date 11/2/2001) but I'll go look at Creative's site. Thanks, bdog231.

 

[MisterPresident]

When I installed Max Payne, it asked me for full or minimal install. i remember minimal was about 250Mb, but full was about 850. If the audio is coming from CD, the problem might be a scratch, or inability to read. Just a thoughy.

 

[Maggotry]

My friend Al had the same problem. We messed around with it for a while and fixed it by turning down his volume on windows. We clicked the little speaker icon in the system tray and turned that down from max to about 3/4 of max then used the volume knob on his speakers to set the volume where he wanted it. I'm not sure what that does, but the crackles went away in MP, UT, and SoF. His specs are WinME and SBLive 5.1 with Creative FPS1600 speakers.

He too had no crackles in anything other than those games mentioned.

 

[MichaelD]

Thanks, Gents. I went into my "Audio HQ" control panel applet that comes with the SBLIVE driver and turned my speakers from 4 to 2, then back to 4. Now it makes a little less noise.

My volume settings in the mixer are all fine. It's gotta be somethign w/MP. I am running the W2K patch. I have noticed that when the crackling gets bad, my framerate suffers.

I'm running 1152x864x32, all details maxxed, triple buffer, no AA. That'll tax anything. Possibly my high settings have something to do w/it? Maybe I'll try just double buffer and see what happnes. I like all my maxxed-out details...wanna keep 'em!

 

[TeABaG88]

I have a GTXP, not a Sb Live, but I also had the crackling sound in Max Payne. I had very high settings also. My solution: Went from GE Force 2 to GE Force 3. Crackling all gone without changing any settings. I had no problems except in Max Payne in the heavy scenes and my framerates suffered when my sound crackled. Figure that system was just being 'bogged' down to much. Hope this helps...

Eric