Hi guys,

Whenever I start a new game, the music is just a static loud hissing sound with slight hints of the music. If I turn the music off, no problems. Sound effects work just fine.

Not a terrible loss, the music is kinda boring, but this is a weird and unexpected. I've tried all possible compatibility modes, makes no difference.

It's been a while since I played the game, but I don't remember this happening before. This is new behavior to me at least.

I am running it on the same machine and the same OS as before, when it worked.

Anyway, anyone had this hissing problem with the game?

There's a good chance either you have fixed it or simply moved on. But I had the same problem. Looking for the answer, turns out is an audio decoder clash problem.

If you have an audio decoder installed, e.g., ffdshow or LAV audio decoder, it will clash with the game's audio decoder (which I think use the default Windows one).

See the following. It's for a different game, but it's the same underlying problem.
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=217747

I fixed mine by following the instructions.

Thank you very much! Yeah, I never actually found a solution, so this is much appreciated and it worked!

In my case some dumbass program had installed the K-Lite codec pack (and of course LAV Audio codec included) and by using the configuration tool provided in the K-Lite pack, I disabled the LAV-audio codec completely. Just shut it down.

I never asked for it anyway on my computer. Now I'm going to check if I can uninstall this K-Lite pack without breaking something. Hmm.

Again, many thanks and I'm actually so annoyed right now that something installed an audio/video codec pack on my system, silently and without permission really - sure it might be a good codec pack and all, but it made it a heck of a lot harder to troubleshoot for audio issues when I didn't even realize this thing had been installed.

Regardless, problem solved and all thanks to you tonyc_76 :)

No problem. The audio problem was pretty annoying.

So, any recommendations on what mods to install? Currently trying the NullSpace mod, but I'm wondering what else is there. There are too many mods to try them all one by one.

I can't seem to find the ffdshow or settings in the LAV splitter so i can exclude the game, which makes it fairly annoying considering i wanted to try it... And uninstalling the CCCP isn't really something i want to do.

I use CCCP myself. CCCP used to use ffdshow but now uses LAV because ffdshow is no longer updated. The old posts elsewhere mentions ffdshow because, well, they were from back when ffdshow was still used. Anyway, LAV does not have the setting to exclude a specific program. What you want to do is disassociate LAV from .mp3. That's in the option somewhere. Something like "use LAV for the following file formats" and then it will have a list of file formats with some of them highlighted and some of them not. Un-select the MP3 format. I am away from the computer so I can not tell you exactly where in the option, but it's there. This will not affect CCCP. I can still listen to my MP3 collection with no trouble. Well, I guess MPC will not be able to play MP3 files, but I don't care since I use MPC to watch videos and uses another program for my music listening.

Very very useful. I found i need to disable MP2 & MP3 in order for the hissing to go away...

Thankfully for music most of the time i end up using VLC which has it's own internal codecs i think, so if it can't find one it uses one it has by default...

Now i wonder if disassociating those two will let the X games work on this computer now... Probably...

Tonyc, you're a life saver! I had exactly the same problem and thanks to you I managed to fix it in just a few minutes. You undoubtedly saved me hours of tedious searching. Much obliged.

yes, most likely problem with installed audio codecs for your sound hardware (chipset). Disable background music also is an option