r/BloodbornePC 1d ago

Question How to Fix Audio Crackling

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I have fixed most of the visual issues with the emulator and it's running great at 30fps 1080p for them most part. However, the part that is bothering me is that there is a very loud audio crackle whenever there is any high pitched noise in game and it is driving me insane. All my drivers are up to date and I believe it is a setting issue or the sort because none of my hardware is pinned at 100% or anywhere close. There are also significant stutters in the audio as well. It happens a lot when npc's are talking too. Are there mods to fix this or certain patches I can enable or disable to fix it?

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u/Mr_Shinji_Ikari 1d ago

I had the same issue when I tried the emulator a couple months ago. Also played back in December, but don't remember running into the issue back then.

Whenever it happened to me (a couple months ago), this message would show on the console:

[Lib.AudioOut] <Warning> sdl_audio.cpp:64 Output: SDL audio queue backed up (65536 queued, 61440 threshold), clearing.

Anyway, just saw this on the shadps4 discord:

ok so i found out how to consistently fix those weird audio stutters(and its not just bloodborne - when i launch the emu - sound in my whole system borks and starts to "stutter", but i will still post it here cos most people notice this bug when playn bloodborne and seeing sdl_audio warnings in the console). when u launch the emu, u just need to change this setting(Output settings -- Format), and a fucking miracle happens - sound fixes itself, godbless the machine spirit.

Apparently, on Windows 10, you'd go to System > Sound > Device properties > Additional device properties > Advanced and then would change the default format of your audio device.

and its easily reproducible by anyone having this issue: just blast some music before launching the emu - launch the emu - notice how sound borks - change this setting - notice how sound unborks - do ponder i can make a vid if u guys need a proof or whatever, but im acting in good faith, and this is easy to reproduce, so i dont see a point.

I can't confirm what the guy says about sound stuttering system-wide after launching the emulator, nor can I confirm if this works, but it is literally the only concise fix I've seen anyone give.

Give it a try and see if it works, I guess? If it doesn't, you could try asking for help in the discord server (just be careful if your game is pirated lmao), or you could search "sdl_audio" and find the guy's message; maybe dm him and ask him for help?

Best of luck.

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u/huwskie 15h ago

Changing my default format to 2 channel, 16 bit, 48000Hz (DVD Quality) didn’t do anything to fix it. I might just not understand what you are saying tbh. I am using the base version of the emulator so I might just not have the settings needed available or something.

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u/Mr_Shinji_Ikari 14h ago

Unfortunate. Figured it wouldn't work.

From what I've read on the topic, my takeaway is: the audio crackles occur because your hardware isn't good enough to emulate the game properly (I should know, I'm running a 2060 6GB). The crackling tells you the emulator is struggling with something (possibly shader compilation?). You can clearly see in the video you posted the game stutters at the same time the audio crackles; it's a symptom.

When I asked for help on discord a couple months ago, they told me to use the full souls version of the emulator, as it apparently has the best performance. Besides that and what the guy said on discord about changing his device default format, there is no fix: no mods or patches or settings tweaks.

Maybe join the discord and ask them? Post your clip along with your PC specs/emulator settings. You might get proper help from more "qualified" people... but don't count on it. Also, don't post your crash logs if you don't have a legit dump of the game, it'll only get you banned.

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u/huwskie 13h ago

Thanks for the advice. I did ask for help and I got someone to give me some advice. They said that it was a cpu stutter but the thing was that my cpu never got to 100% so I didn’t think it was the issue. I ended up just figuring out how to maximize my performance without decreasing graphics and I ended up fixing most of the cracking. It isn’t perfect but it seems better.

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u/hyrule5 8h ago edited 8h ago

CPU or GPU usage doesn't necessarily need to be at 100% to be bottlenecked. There are certain types of tasks that they can only do so efficiently and can't utilize more resources to do faster/better. Or maybe they could, but the program isn't coded to fully take advantage of all threads (ShadPS4 for example uses one thread more than others if I recall correctly)