Windows 7 update messing with SDL2_mixer?

SDL Development
1

I’m having a weird issue. I first noticed that some of the sound effects in my game had a hiss/static quality to them. Thinking it might be my headphones giving up, I unplugged my headphones. No sound came from the laptop speakers. Tried turning up the volume. Still nothing. Plugged the headphones back in. Silence. I then tried the same with VLC to check if this was a global issue, but VLC played some music fine with the headphones plugged in, continued to play from the laptop speakers when the headphones were unplugged, and still played in the headphones when I plugged them back in. This sound issue with SDL2_mixer (I assume) also results in another of my games freezing completely when shutting down (this only happens when the sound is ‘muted’ or whatever is happening when I unplug the headphones and plug them back in). I tested the same thing on a Linux machine and it didn’t have this problem. So… does anybody know if a recent Windows 7 update has messed up SDL2_mixer?

2

Also, if I start the game with headphones unplugged, plugging in the headphones doesn’t seem to do anything – it just keeps playing through the laptop speakers.

3

Found an old version of my game that uses SDL 1.2.14 and SDL_mixer 1.2.12 and it doesn’t have this problem.

4

Well, updating my audio driver fixed the headphone issue. There’s still an issue with high frequencies getting a sharp/hissy tinge to them that I don’t get in the older game version that uses SDL 1.2.

5

Setting audio to 44100 Hz instead of 22050 seems to have fixed the sharp/hissy tinge issue. But all my wavs are 22050, so I guess SDL2_mixer just doesn’t handle being set to 22050 very well?

6

Hi,
I encountered something similar with 11025Hz audio. It turned out to
be a bug either in the SDL2 XAudio2 code, or in XAudio2 itself, which
I filed here: https://bugzilla.libsdl.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2551
Basically, the resampling done by XAudio2 is unusably bad.

Can you see if SDL_AudioInit(“winmm”) or SDL_AudioInit("directsound ")
fixes the issue, in which case it’s likely the same bug as I was
hitting?

IMO, one fix could be, SDL2 could blacklist the XAudio2 driver if it’s
going to have to do any resampling, and fall back to
winmm/directsound.On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 10:08 AM, Christian Knudsen wrote:

Setting audio to 44100 Hz instead of 22050 seems to have fixed the
sharp/hissy tinge issue. But all my wavs are 22050, so I guess SDL2_mixer
just doesn’t handle being set to 22050 very well?

SDL mailing list
SDL at lists.libsdl.org
http://lists.libsdl.org/listinfo.cgi/sdl-libsdl.org

7

eric.w wrote:

Can you see if SDL_AudioInit(“winmm”) or SDL_AudioInit("directsound ")
fixes the issue, in which case it’s likely the same bug as I was
hitting?

Yup, both of these fixed the issue. I’m not getting any distortion at 22050 Hz now. With winmm there was a 1-2 second audio delay, so that wasn’t really usable, but directsound seems to work perfect. So I can just use that without any problems?

8

eric.w wrote:

Can you see if SDL_AudioInit(“winmm”) or SDL_AudioInit("directsound ")
fixes the issue, in which case it’s likely the same bug as I was
hitting?

Yup, both of these fixed the issue. I’m not getting any distortion at
22050 Hz now. With winmm there was a 1-2 second audio delay, so that wasn’t
really usable, but directsound seems to work perfect. So I can just use
that without any problems?

I’m not sure to be honest, but I assume it’s safe, SDL1.2 only had waveout
and directsound.
Here are the docs for the SDL_AudioInit function:
https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL_AudioInit?highlight=(\bCategoryAudio\b)|(CategoryEnum)|(CategoryStruct)On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 2:10 PM, Christian Knudsen < webmaster at asciisector.net> wrote: