Hi!, I would like to know what the problem is behind the 44.1khz rate in Xaudio, since with this configuration the sound cuts out and completely desynchronizes (tested with several sound cards). If anyone is wondering why not use the Wasapi backend, well, Wasapi also has problems with this rate, such as a kind of ugly distortion in the high frequencies (in many games, especially Snes ones and a very strange effect on the sound of the rings in Sonic games, for example). This is apparently solved by deactivating the dynamic rate, but we don’t want that. I have no problem using 48hz, but I need 44.1 in general Windows and changing the rate manually is quite annoying. Sorry bad english, greetings!
Similar thing is happening here too. Using 1.17.0. I get awful, loud tv static-type noise distortion when using xaudio, but only when using lower than default (64ms) audio latency.
Seems to occur in only certain cores with xaudio like Snes9x, Beetle PSX and Beetle PCE.
Using 44000 or 48000 with xaudio instead fix the issue for me. I can get low audio latency settings no prob. Using wasapi driver instead works as well. Though the wasapi driver currently seem to have some frame drops issues with those same cores, mentioned here.
If you don’t want to change the audio rate every time you can try having a per-core setting by adding a line in your core cfg file.
For example if you add this the snes9x cfg: audio_out_rate = “48000”
the core will use 48000hz but other cores will use the default 44100.
Thanks for the reply! Yes, same thing, apparently the conflict in Xaudio is with the non-integer rates, but I’m curious what causes it and why these samplerates are offered without any type of warning at least, as if they had no problem. As for settings per core, I thought about it, in fact, I tried leaving Retroarch globally at 48hz and Windows at 44.1hz, but two issues arise: Firstly, some games present clicks and pops occasionally, and on the other hand I assume that the extra step of resampling adds a little more latency and quality degradation.
Yeah, getting perfect or near perfect video/audio synchronization often requires a lot of testing and trials and errors. It depends on a lot of factors like your PC components, OS, GFX card driver, core you’re using, RA settings etc… Needless to say the number of different possible setups are huge. And RetroArch certainly has a lot audio/video sync related options.
One thing I did is start with a new, clean RA installation -keep your old current one; just extract the last RA version somewhere else to have a clean testing environment and start from there, changing one setting at a time.
Also, one great tool to test for sound cracking, scrolling smoothness, whether you get frame drops and general audio/video testing imo are the 240p Test Suite available for multiple platforms (they’re free homebrews so should be ok to post).
The PCE-CD version with the “MDFourier” sub test is especially good at detecting audio cracks/pops. Any possible cracks will be made immediately apparent.
Just based on my experience and setup -most important settings are: audio driver, video driver, audio delay in ms (sometimes weirdly enough I had much better results at a lower rate like ~22ms than a higher ~40ms). The rest I normally leave as-is and I can get smooth scrolling with no frame hiccups and no audio cracking on most cores. But again, one setting might work well with a core or driver and not the other so there’s some trial and error involved.
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I was doing some tests and apparently disabling the audio rate control (audio rate control delta 0.000) the audio artifacts disappear, while the scroll synchronization is maintained correctly. This surprised me since I believed that doing this made 100% smooth synchronization impossible, but it works fine.
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Whow, that fixed the issue I had with the Dolphin core.
Didn’t had any audio cracks or anything but I had an annoying frame skips/drops every 3-4 seconds or so, even with 60fps games. Now it’s smooth with both video/scrolling and audio. Good find.
Amazing, dude. No crackling no popping, no mysteroius frame skips. Tested with a handfull of cores. never touched that setting before because of the fearmongering info text next to it.
Together with V-Sync=off in the Graphics settings I have finally now reached total smothness with all systems 