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Nov 29, 2002
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OK I got this problem with EU2 and HoI. Its hard to describe. Basically, when certain music is playing I get these subtle, almost muted or cut-off, computerish chirps and beeps in the background. It goes away when one song stops and another is about to stop, or if I disable music.

Any ideas?

I have XP Pro SP1, Athlon XP+, and an Audigy Gamer.

Thanks
olaf
 
If you play the EU2 or HoI tracks through another MP3 player do you get the same sounds?

First thing I'd try is reducing the hardware acceleration by one notch on your sound card (Start-->Run: dxdiag.exe then click on the sound tab). Back off the hardware acceleration a titch and you may be fine...all assuming your drivers are current.
 
Let's try turning it off altogether then. Follow the same instructions but drag the slider all the way to the left to disable hardware acceleration of your sound card.

If that doesn't work then you might try renaming your AVI folder to AVI_OLD in case there's some sort of problem relating to conflicts there.

Failing that, I think it's probably better to use the settings utility to change your music to "off" in the game, and then play it from your mp3 player in the background. The utility can be found in the root directory of the game (i.e. C:\....\Europa Universalis 2\EU2_Settings.exe)
 
I'm having the same problem. I use a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card. I had the problem when I was using a Soundblaster Live too. I can play the MP3 files fine outside of the game.

Turning hardware acceleration down affects other games adversely. I could just play with no music, or with another MP3 player, but especially in the case of EU2, the music is keyed to the time period I am currently playing in in the game. The game should be fixed, I think.

Apparently this is not an isolated problem. Would it be possible for Paradox to check this out?

I suspect it may have something to do with codecs. What codecs does HoI/EU2 use? What codecs do those codecs conflict with?

My specs:
Windows XP Home
Athlon 1GHz
1.2 GB RAM
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
GeForce 3 Ti500
 
It is virtually impossible for any company to test all possible combinations of hardware that people might try to use. About 99% or more of all EU2 installations work perfectly with no tweaking so I'm afraid that it's more a case of something unusal with your particular combination than an issue of a basic game fault. We have determined that in many cases it's possible to get rid of the problem by reducing or turning off the hardware acceleration on certain cards. Yes, it could be the codex...but I really doubt it since this is not even remotely close to being a universal problem with people's systems.

Olaf73: You say your drivers "seem up to date". How sure are you? Are you currently using this one for you CL card? What build is your DirectX? What build is your OS? When did you last update your BIOS? Are your video and sound cards in adjacent slots in your motherboard?

Armandeaus: Strange as it may seem, it's probably the nVidia card driver that's at the root of the problem. Are you running the 41.09 driver update? Same questions re your OS, DirectX, BIOS etc.
 
I have the exact same problem, some of the music tracks played in-game have those 'artifacts' described by olaf73. When I play the mp3s in Winamp, they sound fine.

I'm running Windows XP Pro on a P4 2.27 with 512 RAM, MSI Ti 4600, and a Creative Audigy.

Last time I reinstalled Windows from scratch, the in-game music started working fine (hardware acceleration was set to maximum), which leads me to believe it's something else I installed that interferes with the in-game music.

What I tried so far:

Reinstalling the game; uninstalling the Audigy drivers and installing the latest ones; uninstalling all video and audio codecs as well as everything under Sound, Video and Game controllers in Device Manager (in Safe mode); uninstalling the Nvidia Detonator drivers and installing the latest version.

I know I can reinstall Windows or use a workaround such as playing the mp3s in Winamp in the background, but I'd rather not do that.

What else can I try?
 
Last edited:
By the way, I when I'm installing new Detonator drivers I get a message saying that it's recommended to uninstall the old drivers first. So, I uninstall the old driver, and get a prompt saying that I need to reboot to complete the uninstallation, so I click Yes (if I click No the old driver is not removed).

After rebooting, Windows XP promptly 'discovers' the video card and installs the old driver right back.

The same thing seems to happen in Safe Mode.

How do I prevent Windows from installing the old driver back?
 
Originally posted by Dagrem
Last time I reinstalled Windows from scratch, the in-game music started working fine (hardware acceleration was set to maximum), which leads me to believe it's something else I installed that interferes with the in-game music.
Click to expand...
Do you have any idea what you might have installed immediately before the sound first started to give you trouble again? I'd really love to try to pin this down to a specific cause if we can.

- Did it start giving problems after a spicific Windows Update?
- Ditto...driver update?
- Ditto...DirectX Update?
- Ditto...installed another game?
- Ditto...installed some other piece of software (non-game)?
- Any other suspicions or thoughts as to whast changed on your system from the tme that the sound was fine to the time when it wasn't?
 
Originally posted by Dagrem
By the way, I when I'm installing new Detonator drivers I get a message saying that it's recommended to uninstall the old drivers first. So, I uninstall the old driver, and get a prompt saying that I need to reboot to complete the uninstallation, so I click Yes (if I click No the old driver is not removed).

After rebooting, Windows XP promptly 'discovers' the video card and installs the old driver right back.

The same thing seems to happen in Safe Mode.

How do I prevent Windows from installing the old driver back?
Click to expand...
Sorry. We cross-posted there. Give me a minute to check that out and give you details.
 
Okay...when WinXP "discovers" your video card does it not give you a choice of which driver to apply? I haven't done this recently with a "critical driver" so I'm a little rusty.
 
to do it properly, change your video card to VGA standard before using the uninstall.

might work.

if not, when you reboot, it should give you a choice of drivers to install and then you select the VGA standard card from the list.

once it's done, install the new detonator.
 
one idea here...

go to control panel, system, hardware, device manager:
select the view menu: "Resources by connection"

go under Interupt Request (IRQ):
are there any IRQs that are shared for multiple devices?

For example, on my system it shows IRQ4 being used for my sound card, my video card, my firewire port, my ultra IDE controller and my USB port...

a bit too much stuff for my tastes, yet XP tells me there's no conflict... Apparently, it can share IRQs with no problem:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314068

however, I have my suspicions...
 
I am in the process of finding and removing stuff I installed just before the music bug surfaced. The problem is, uninstalling a program does not remove everything it installed so whatever is causing the problem may still be on my system. If I find anything useful, I'll post it here.
 
Yes, please do let us know so we can keep it in mind for future reference.

You might want to consider doing a complete OS reinstall and really start from scratch?
 
I have no idea why, but when I played EU2 today the in-game music distortions have disappeared.

Recent changes to the system:

Installed and then uninstalled: various DivX related codecs.

Installed: NVRefreshTool 2.1, Adobe Acrobat Reader + Download Manager, SLD CODEC PAK 1.5, Morrowind, Medieval Total War

Uninstalled: Pac Man Adventures In Time, RivaTuner

Tweaks: changed video card (MSI Ti4600) settings, disabled qttask.exe (QuickTime manager) from loading on startup

If you try any of this and your in-game music starts working normally, please post here.
 
Bizzarely, I get this exact same problem when playing Pharaoh.
 
Originally posted by Dagrem
Tweaks: changed video card (MSI Ti4600) settings, disabled qttask.exe (QuickTime manager) from loading on startup
Click to expand...
Interesting...that's the third person who has reported having done this and suddenly having the sound work again. Now I'm wondering if somehow QT is intercepting and trying to handle the sounds for some reason?

Vincent Julien: Have you tried disabling QT?
 
Originally posted by MrT
Interesting...that's the third person who has reported having done this and suddenly having the sound work again. Now I'm wondering if somehow QT is intercepting and trying to handle the sounds for some reason?

Vincent Julien: Have you tried disabling QT?
Click to expand...
The interesting thing is, I used to always right-click on the QT icon and click 'Exit' so the icon would disappear. After I did that, qttask.exe was not in the list of processes in Task Manager. But despite that, the music was garbled. So if it -is- QT that's causing this, it is not enough to exit it - you have to prevent it from loading on startup altogether.

To do that:

Click Start, Run...
Type msconfig in the box.
In the General (first) tab, select 'Selective Startup'
In the Startup (last) tab, uncheck the entry labeled 'qttask'.
Close msconfig and reboot the computer.
 
Originally posted by MrT
Vincent Julien: Have you tried disabling QT?
Click to expand...

I'm going to try it. I get the same problem with The Sims now.
 
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