Emulator

This issue was present even before the merge of the new ax hle, it was even worse before the merge as the music sometimes stopped permanently, while now it comes and goes at regular intervals. It's interesting that those games run at full speed so the issue is not performance related.

I think it definitely has something to do with the audio plugin (not a coder here).
Lots of others have also had this problem... both games are basically unplayable because of it.

http://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-resident-evil-2-and-3-sound-problems--25488

I'd even go as far as paying someone through PayPal to fix it.
I just really wanna enjoy these classic RE games. :/

The audio plays fine with DSP LLE since r421a75493cd2. The issue has to do with the dma transfer timing.

With your recommendation, I tried DSP LLE, and it's definitely a massive improvement.

Sadly, the audio still seems to be quite glitchy and is fading in out of each speaker, with a lot of stuttering during gameplay. Not sure if this is a performance issue, but I don't think it is.

OpenAL should help with the stuttering in DSP LLE mode. There are builds for testing here: r1c462a1ecaa5.

indeed the combination LLE + OpenAL makes the sound almost perfect. Thanks!

@skidau - are there plans to fix this in the new HLE too?

Changing the MAX_SLICE_LENGTH to 1000 from 20000 will fix this issue but makes the emulator run slowly.

Builds between fifo-bp merge and 1054 have perfect audio support in RE2 and 3. rev r4c6bbec600cc doesn't seem to fix the problem fully, it makes audio a little choppy, as if the audio plugin quickly switch between buffering and playing states.

Unfortunate this doesn't fix the "Sound pops in an out" in Resident Evil 4. Issue 6151

Issue 6153 has been merged into this issue.