Audio causing game to stutter/freeze for a second

gohan2091 · Post by **gohan2091** » Thu Oct 16, 2008 1:47 pm

I have a problem which I've experienced since I first installed Oblivion. When you're near an enemy who is about to turn aggressive and attack you, the background music changes from EXPLORE to BATTLE. When this happens, my game pauses for approx 1 second, then it's smooth again. When the enemy is killed and no more enemies are near by, the background music changes back from BATTLE to EXPLORE. Again, the game pauses for 1 second whenever this change takes place.

When I set bMusicEnabled to 0 in the oblivion.ini, the problem goes away so it's definity something to do with the background music. Obviously I can solve this by disabling the background music, but I don't want to do that. I have added custom music in the Oblivion music folders and I thought maybe this was the cause, so I removed them but the game still pauses with the default music. I had an idea that maybe it's to do with an audio codec I have installed, so I uninstalled both AC3 Filter and Radium MP3 codec but this does not help. FFDSHOW does not run when Oblivion is running, I've added it to it's blacklist (and also tried uninstalling it)

What is the cause of this? I'm sure it's nothing to do with the footstep sounds, as during battle, the game doesn't pause, it only does this when the music changes from one folder to another. I installed Oblivion on my dads computer (he is on XP Pro 32bit) and I copied my whole oblivion folder over to his computer. His Oblivion runs worse than mine (because he has a slower computer, but we have identical sound cards - X-Fi XtremeMusic) but the game does not pause when the music changes... how come? This does not happen in any other game. I have all the codecs installed that he has, plus a few more.

Thanks

gohan2091 · Post by **gohan2091** » Thu Oct 16, 2008 7:08 pm

I am pretty sure I fixed it! I found a program that allows me to enable/disable individual (or as many as I want) codecs on my computer (called mmview). I simply narrowed it down and came to the solution that 2 codecs were causing the stuttering.

ArcSoft Audio Decoder HD
ArcSoft Audio Effect HD

Both of these have to be disabled on my computer, or the game will stutter when the background music changes. I have to test this more, but I think I fixed my game!

Fljotsdale · Post by **Fljotsdale** » Fri Oct 17, 2008 1:34 pm

Well done!

I didn't have a clue!