Sound Problems

[borak2k7]

Now I'll warn you I did a search for audio and sound and came up with not much so I think this post shouldn't be a duplicate of one previously.

Certain cut scenes tend to make the sound on my game disappear when playing, and in the scene afterwards (ie when you blow up the first reactor and the cut scene for when it explodes happens, the room where you blow the door through to escape has no sound and when you jump through afterwards does as well. also when you jump on the train the cut scene had sound but when you jump into the train i couldn't hear anything in that carraige either until i moved on). It usually corrects itself after moving to another frame. Does this mean the cut scenes are messing up with my sound due to loading off the disc or is it something else?

[Jari]

You know, it would help if you told us which game this is.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that only one of them had reactors you'll blow up, but it would be tad more obvious if you spelled it out.

[borak2k7]

LOL sorry about that coz I only use this place for FF7 (I thought it was like the ONLY game that ppl discussed) I didn't put it. Obviously its FF7 I'm talking about

[Khan Deljack]

I'm bumping this because I have the same problem...

The problem seems to be that the sound effects and the music volume for some reason are linked. When the game mutes the music it also mutes the sound effects too. I can see the effect for myself by going into the options menu and reducing the music volume and hearing the sound effect go away with it.

At present I'm using the 1.02 patch on vista with high res and high poly models patch. If anyone knows  how to fix the problem please can they reply

[Superpiccolo]

I have this exact problem.

Vista Ult x64.
Core2 Duo E4500
8600GTS

Apart from this the game works great (as far as I am anyway, which is the first save point).

I am playing with all these:

http://fem1.uniag.sk/Miroslav.Jezik/ff7ncopam.html

Not including:

Upside-down FMV cutscenes patch
5.a) FF7PC Hand Patch mod v01.6  by Srethron Askvelhtnod
7. Advent Avatars mod  by Wuz

I have all others installed and working.

An odd thing I noticed is that the first time I played it with the FF7 Music Mod it worked. Then when I quit and then got back in it acts like previously mentioned (no SFX at all, only mp3 BG music, can hear SFX when turn music volume up in settings, but also hear MIDI).

Also the "Laptop Keypad patch" seemed to work then also, but now it does not function at all.

[obesebear]

What options do you have checked in your FF7 Music config?

[Tsetra]

I'm betting you all have SoundMAX audio? I do, and it seems everyone else who's posted this problem has it. For some reason the problem hasn't been addressed on here.
It's FF7Music's settings that are screwing you guys over I bet. I believe the solution I came up with was changing my equalizing from logarithmic to linear, but I can double check later and post the solution here as well as the FF7Music topic. In the mean time, if that doesn't work, then it's one of the same options on that page. That same page was the only one I played around with stuff in the FF7Music configuration, and that's what solved the problem. It's not ramping, and it's not mute/max midi functions, that much I know for sure.

EDIT,
Alrighty. Took a look at my FF7Music, anyone who has this same problem try this:

Open up FF7Music.
Select Configure. You should start out on the "Setup" Tab.
In the Setup tab, under your input plugin, select Configure.
In your input plugin configuration, select the "Decoder" tab.

Now, all of these might not be necessary, but here are the things I have checked, and I now have sound in the cutscenes:
- CRC Checking
- Linear EQ
- Fast Layer 3 EQ
- Fast Layer 1/2 EQ

EDIT2 - These instructions have reportedly caused significant speed-up of game play, follow them ONLY if nothing else works.

Try the first reactor again, and the sound should play when it explodes, and while Jesse sets the bomb. If so, the rest of your silent cutscenes are back to normal.
If this doesn't work, let me know.

[Superpiccolo]

Hmm. Doesn't seem to fix it unfortunately.

Also it seems now playing around with those options, the whole game plays really really quick. I set all the options to what they were before, but everything still moves around too quick.

My sound settings under the Config:

SOUND
Sound Driver - Realtek Digital Output (Realtek High Definition Audio) [This is on board sound, I don't have a SoundCard]

MIDI
Midi Driver - Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth
Midi Data - General Midi
Logarithmic Volume Control - Unchecked

[Tsetra]

Damn, well hopefully that will work for other people with SoundMAX drivers at the very least. My advice would be to save just before a faulty cutscene, then tweak your settings and try and try again. FF7Music seems to be entirely reliant on each individual system and it's drivers. I still suspect your success is going to lie in the input plugin configuration. I don't know if it actually did anything, but where it lets you define what types of files it handles, I added in .AVI. Considering some scenes still worked prior to this though, I suspect this made no difference.
If you manage to get this to work, you should report what worked so we've got more info on the matter.

[Superpiccolo]

Well I have no sound on the opening cut-scene (Areith in Midgar, track out to train), so, I'll just continue to do new game until it works.

I shall tweak what I can, and adjust anything I can think of, I will certainly post any results. Any further information from anyone experience anything even remotely similar would be great also.

EDIT: I have made some progress. Thanks to this post:

http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=7138.msg87951#msg87951

"My next problem was with the ff7 music.  I ended up having to use the highwind decompiler to remove the midis from the lgp files so that they wouldn't play over the mp3's.  It sucks that the sound fx are integrated into the music volume, or I would've just turned the in-game music down."

I did this and now it works. My problem now is the music does not resume properly. It plays a track, and then when I change areas it starts from the beginning again. This worked before, but I have not changed anything related to the mp3s, so it still should work.

The option under FF7 Music about resume is ticked to "Selective" which is default.

[Vehek]

The problem there is that when you delete the MIDIs from the LGP, FF7 can't go "Oh, I'm already playing song x". So it says "reading midi file: XXXX.MID" again. FF7Music notices the message and plays the song. That's what I think is going on.

[obesebear]

Vehek is right, I tried to delete the files in the midi lgp so only the mp3's would play.  There is no way (that I could find) to make the sound work properly if the needed  midi's are deleted.

When I played through I noticed there were quite a few sounds missing.  Off the top of my head, I remember in the flashback the truck made no sound driving in the rain, and when you enter that fight against the dragon the dum dum - dum dum - dum dum bg music didn't play.  And you're right the only way to get those noises to play is to turn up the midi volume, because FF7 music doesn't recognize those midi files, meaning there is no way to sub in any mp3 in place of that midi.

However, it could possibly work if you recorded a midi that made no sound and used that to override the original ones in the lgp.  If what Vehek says is right about how FF7 Music reads the files, then in theory it should work.  Let me know if that works for you.

[Superpiccolo]

@ Vehek. Hmm, yea fair enough.

@ obesebear. Both of those situations you mention I clearly recall (when I played the PSOne Version) there was no music during those moments (for dramatic effect, or maybe someone missed putting in the music).

Yea right, i'll see if I can do that. I'll let you know how it goes. 

EDIT: Hmm, maybe I didn't do it right (which is possible) but I added a whole bunch of blank midi files to the lgp file (well not blank, I put "MThd" at the beginning of all of them as that is what midis have) and still no luck.

Dam, well going back to the main issue, this being only a Vista problem (is that right, is any non vista person having this exact problem?) is there some way to separate the in game MUSIC volume control from the SFX? Or is that something that is more hard coded?

[obesebear]

Well I tried replacing all the files in midi.lgp with blank ones.  All of the names stayed the same but I substituted almost all files with a blank midi I created.

However, doing this caused the music to repeat itself when switching between screens that use the same file.  Is this because the file length has been altered?

[Vehek]

I don't know if my theory really works. Check the log file and see what it says after each "MIDI play".