Emulator

If it needs more testing, why don't you do it? That would be the fastest way to get it fixed.

Of course I will test more revisions. But this will take some time and could need some help by others interested in getting this fixed. I guess it is caused by one one of the larger merges but we will see. As the problem is really strange and games like Mario Sunshine run fine, I wonder if other games are affected as well.

The game runs at perfectly stable 60FPS and has nearly no audio issues in 3.5-420.
Using 3.5-1090 the Game still runs at stable 60FPS but audio sounds extremely slow and distorted and is heavily crackling. I'm very busy at the moment but I will definitely try to find the revision causing this at a later date.

(This is OT:) And I disagree, crackling audio due to slow frame rates is an issue by definition, as it worked perfectly fine with the old asynchronous HLE. Therefore Dolphin needs a new asynchronous audio back end. Even if a game runs at an average of 59,999 FPS now it will occasionally crackle which is not acceptable. This is why LLE and both HLE are inferior to old HLE since both it will crackle even on high end systems. Only the old HLE has 100% crackle-free audio. For further reference, see issue 6075 . Once the new HLE gets into a stable build, you will be flooded with bug reports regarding this topic as the majority of users is affected. However, this OT section has nothing to do with the issue report.

Has the audio timestretch code been merged already? Audio really runs at half the speed and sounds more like ambient in 3.5-1090 while it should and does sound like hard rock in 3.5-420. Like some kind of audio time stretch that tries to scale down the audio from 120 FPS to 60 FPS. (I have a 120hz screen.)

Changing the display refresh rate to 60HZ or playing around with frame limiter settings didn't change anything. With all options other than Framelimit = Off the audio on the title screen was running slow. Even with game running at 100FPS, the audio was still too slow. With Framelimit = Off the audio got insanely fast. There is no way to get the audio running at normal speed, like in 3.5-420.

LLE audio is also affected. It runs normal in 3.5-420 60 FPS and half speed in 3.5-1090 60 FPS. (You need to compare the music on the title screen).

Ok i tried again to find which setting might be responsible with hle, with direct sound i managed to get more severe crackling that i don't get with xaudio, but still there was no half speed(like slow motion)sound. The game runs at 60 fps and 60fps normally btw, why does it run at 120 fps for you?

Have you enabled the accurate vbeam emulation setting?

All settings are default. Forcing Accurate Vbeam On or Off doesn't change anything. With Framelimit = Auto, the game runs at 60FPS. Only with higher settings the FPS gets higher too. The crackling is not the core of the problem since the slow sound is causing it. Both HLE and LLE are equally affected, both were perfectly fine in 3.5-420.

I will likely not have any Internet or PC access the next days but I try to track down the exact revision later.

And did I mention that Dolphin sometimes crashes when pressing Escape after the error occurred?

Ok i managed to replicate it and find the culprit too, my bad, i was using 1086 and it run fine, then upgraded to 1091 and it has the issue. I am removing the questionable and i guess it is the fifo commit revision e38e48923dcf, i will try to confirm it...

So a issue that was created four days ago is affected by a commit that was made four /hours/ ago? I didn't know scientificraver was a time traveler.

It was removed for a few commits and then it was readded to fix a different issue. So the commit i tested didn't have it.

Btw scientific raver does limiting based to sound fix this issue to you? It reminds me of a previous issue with the fifo bp branch.

No, limiting FPS to audio does not fix it.

Hmm, limiting to audio outputs the actual frames the sound is running, in this case 50-53 instead of 60 and therefore the big crackling. Doesn't fix it though, just confirms that audio runs slower than it should be...

The music track on the "Press Start" screen sounds the same to me in 3.5-401, 3.5-424, 3.5-1089 and 3.5-1099. The framerate is 60/60.

I am using OpenAL. Tried both DX9 and OGL.

Have you got a good dump of the game? Can you check the md5 against redump.org? The title screen uses audio streaming dtk which will break if the dump is no good. Older versions of Dolphin were more tolerant to bad images, but as Dolphin gets more accurate and hacks are removed, some bad images can break.

Skid, i got the issue ingame personally, just press start to start a race, it will start to crackle a lot and i could notice a small sound delay, that was made more apparent when i limited based to audio, same crackling and audio speed compared to auto with about 50fps instead of 60 shown.

I'm not hearing any problem with the music in game either. Since this game uses audio streaming, the OpenAL backend must be used as it is the only backend with accurate timing (as of 3.5-1100).

I tried again the latest version, it is again fixed and i got myself a testing headache, lol... Scientificraver, try the latest dolphin version to see if it is fixed for you too and to close this issue before it rises from the dead....

Problem is still there in build 3.5-1124 (Xaudio2). Normally I'm not using OpenAL because it is slow and heavily crackling on my system, has a very high delay and I absolutely dislike the distorted audio stretching. But I will try to reinstall it (new system installation) and check again. As far as I remember, in order to use OpenAL some dll files had to be placed somewhere in the Dolphin folder?

Since it is perfectly working in 3.5-420 (Xaudio2), switching to OpenAL would be a workaround and not a solution. I might have used the shrink function on the dump to save disk space, so I will try to redump the game. Why not just fix the Xaudio2 back end, which is used by most users?

OpenAL also sounds slow (build 3.5-1124), next I will try to redump the image.

I'd recommend grabbing 3.5-1156 since it merged in some AX changes and may change your results.

But if kostamar was able to reproduce the error with a good dump before, I maybe can save that time. Nearly all my dumps are currently trimmed / shrunken to save huge amounts of disk space.

Oh, I just wanted to avoid the new HLE as long as possible. The new synchronous audio does break all my Wii games and therefore I cannot continue to use current revisions of dolphin unless a new asynchronous audio is available. I cannot play any Wii game with stable 60FPS but I almost completed Xenoblade and Zelda SS in 1080p, which will be no longer possible with the new HLE in place.

3.5-1156 does not fix the problem.

I seem to have the same problem with Zelda: SS Eldin Volcano Area. In my opinion this a Dolphin issue since it worked fine with older revisions and shrinking / trimming should leave all valid audio data 100% intact. So there would be no need to break these games with the new code.

Bump. Issue happens in 3.5-2371. Audio is choppy regardless of API used. My computer more than meets the requirements so speed is not an issue. Dump might have gotten corrupted when making, will try to make a clean one.

Core i5 3570 ivy bridge
MSI GeForce GTX 660
8 GB DDR3 SDRAM

So yeah, my PC is plenty fast. Not sure why the audio is so horrible on this game.