Emulator

Interesting. Can we get other people to confirm this? I believe this is a valid issue report, but without Windows 8 I can't confirm it for you. Thanks.

I have experienced Xaudio related crashes on occasion under specific circumstances (which are rare and escape me for the moment), but I'm not getting random crashes. This using a X-Fi Xtrememusic under Windows 8.1.

Sorry, ignore that. I'm getting my emulators muddled. It was PCSX2 that was crashing on me.

What sound device are you using?

Just the onboard chip of my Asus Maximus VI Hero board. Not sure what the hell chip it even is, as Windows shows it generically as "high definition audio device".

I've been playing all night with DirectSound and haven't had a single crash, by the way.

Hey, is it possible you could provide a windows core-dump from an xaudio2 crash? That would help a developer debug it.

Not reproducible here. Always used XAudio2 with Dolphin in Windows 8/8.1 and never got a single crash like what's reported here. XAudio2 is rock stable, even in Windows 8...

I have XAudio crashes on Windows 7 64-Bit actually. Onboard audio here, it's a Realtek or VIA something.

It's crashed multiple times, with "Dolphin has stopped working..." window. And it crashed once on a different game, assuming same issue.

Resource wise, looks normal, CPU usage is around 30% of 6 cores and RAM is around 3gb used. AMD-FX chip. AMD Radeon HD 6xxx series graphics card.

I do need to update my GPU driver a bit, but I don't see that this would effect XAudio much. It's not that outdated.

Excerpt from Windows' Event Viewer:
Faulting application name: Dolphin.exe (version 4.0.2)
Faulting module name: XAudio2_7.dll_unloaded
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x000007fedaa42891
Faulting process id: 0x1784

I'm curious if this crash dump is similar to the original poster.

Hey guys, sorry for the delayed posting of my crash dump:

Faulting application name: Dolphin.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x5299030d
Faulting module name: XAudio2_7.dll_unloaded, version: 9.29.1962.0, time stamp: 0x4c0643cc
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0000000000032891
Faulting process id: 0x1168

There are five nearly identical entries spanning several hours of play. I've continued to use DirectSound since that day and haven't had a single crash.

jhonn.copperfield, are you on x64? If not, that would seem to simplify things.

Incidentally, I could probably also stand to update my GPU driver, but I'm on such an old card that I have a hard time imagining that having anything to do with the problem. I'll give that a shot and see if I can still consistently reproduce the behavior.

Yep, that didn't change anything:

Faulting application name: Dolphin.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x5299030d
Faulting module name: XAudio2_7.dll_unloaded, version: 9.29.1962.0, time stamp: 0x4c0643cc
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0000000000032891
Faulting process id: 0xdcc

Running as admin, running in compatibility mode for Win7 make no differences either.

As for my Windows environment, I run it pretty barebones. My only startup app is f.lux and I diligently keep my services clean. This Windows installation is less than a month old.

Dolphin doesn't support x86 anymore so we shouldn't care. I retested current master version (x64) and still didn't get any crash. Also, if it were a problem caused exclusively by Dolphin, we would probably got more reports from more users(right now this seem to occur only with a very small percentage of Dolphin users)...

Doing a quick search for "XAudio2_7.dll_unloaded" in Google also reveal some people having exactly this same problem with PCSX2, Far Cry Map Editor, Legend of Grimrock and some Steam games, alongside other Windows applications, so, this definitely isn't an issue with Dolphin...

From what I saw in the quick search I did, people with "XAudio2_7.dll_unloaded" errors had something wrong with their system. Apparently people with AMD hardware or additional sound devices (like USB Headsets) are the most affected by this same problem, so, it's something wrong either with XAudio2 install or your sound card drivers.

Also, @andy.vingamer who commented earlier in this issue got this problem in Windows 7 too, assuming my theory is correct, you two probably have some hardware in common that causes this problem, so, it's not a specific problem that occur with Windows 8 only.

I would suggest updating your sound card drivers (avoid the default sound drivers from Windows), reinstalling DirectX End-User runtimes and even updating chipset drivers to see if that helps...

I would like to add that I too switched to DSound and played for a couple of hours without Dolphin stopping. Also, I actually didn't need to update my graphics driver, it was already at the latest version.

I'd tend to agree with jhonn, this makes sense. In my case, I already have sound card drivers from VIA Technologies installed. Going to try to reinstall the above mentioned, and I can try a USB Sound Adapter (one came with a headset) instead of onboard audio to see if that changes anything.

Also jhonn.copperfield, XAudio2 is something that is installed with Dolphin, correct? You mentioned that it maybe something 'wrong either with XAudio2 install or your sound card drivers'. I've already tried reinstalling Dolphin by the way.

XAudio2 is a component installed by DirectX End User Runtimes, not by Dolphin...

I have this issue as well with my windows 8! but my dolphin crashes when i go to the start menu of both smash bros brawl and melee but when i play defend your castle every thing is ok..

A coredump, aka, a dmp file would be a lot nicer. Next time dolphin crashes, start the task manager, right click the exe, and click "create core dump" or something like that. IT should be obvious which one is right. Then, take that file, upload it somewhere zipped, and let us know what build of Dolphin you were using and it can be analyzed.

Chances are since the fault module is outside of Dolphin, that it's not a Dolphin problem, but I figure we should have it here.

Ok, here's a dump file. Dolphin version is stable 4.0.2 (Nov. 2013)

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62566201/Dolphin%204.0.2%20XAudio2_7.dll%20Crash%20Dump.7z

Still don't know why it's doing it. Assured that chipset and gfx drivers are up to date and reinstalled. Sound Card too.

About DirectX, dxdiag shows that it's ver. 11...the End-User runtime that I tried (installs DX 9.0c) says that there is a newer DirectX version (11) so it doesn't install. I'm going to go ahead and include dxdiag info.

Tried everything short of updating Dolphin to a dev version and trying it on another computer. I'm going to stick with DSound for now.

Oh, and finally this happens with DSP set to HLE OR LLE recompiler.

I used to have this problem with old Realtek drivers (though only once every few hours not 5 min), but the new ones fixed it.

andy.vingamer can you use a development build of dolphin and post a crash dump of that if it still occurs? https://dolphin-emu.org/download/
If it doesn't occur, post that too.

I think I fixed this issue since 4.0.2 https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-dolphin-crashes-after-10-15-minutes-due-to-xaudio2-7-dll-unloaded?highlight=xaudio2

At this moment, I'm testing Dsound as well, since I had the same crashes (when 10 - 20 minutes into a game) with Xaudio selected....