Terrible sound quality

[tater]

Easy to replicate. Run 1.1 (1230) on a mac (I'm using yosemite, 10.10.5). Sound music is garbled.

Seems worse on loading screen. Sound elsewhere seems sorta normal... but different (and not in a good way).

Edited April 20, 2016 by tater

[Rocket_Tamer]

I've been getting poor sound quality on Linux Mint 17.3 64bit too. Versions prior to 1.1 have been fine. The game is still playable just that the sound isn't as good for some reason. The music seems to have a warble to it and things like seperation sounds are as if the are highly compressed.

[Nerdman]

Yes, it has been this way since the 1.1 pre-release version up to 1.1.2 build 1260 (which is the current version as of this writing).
I'm using the Windows version myself, so it would seem to be a problem for all OS builds.

There are some reports on the bugtracker about this issue:

http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/7856

http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/9612

Hope it gets fixed, soon!

[technicalfool]

It's definitely most noticeable with the music tracks. I wouldn't call it terrible, but there are audible compression artifacts.

Updated the tracker.

[sal_vager]

Just how bad is this sound?  I had issues running the windows version of KSP in Wine that resulted in extremely poor sound quality, for example the playback was at twice the rate and the sound was extremely warbally.

But this was solved on Wine by running the 64bit version on Wine64, and the 32bit version on the normal 32bit Wine install only.

 

[Nerdman]

10 hours ago, sal_vager said:

Just how bad is this sound?  I had issues running the windows version of KSP in Wine that resulted in extremely poor sound quality, for example the playback was at twice the rate and the sound was extremely warbally.

But this was solved on Wine by running the 64bit version on Wine64, and the 32bit version on the normal 32bit Wine install only.

 

I am running the Windows version of KSP natively in Windows (Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 x64), so I can't comment on that (it sounds like another issue).
However, to my ears the it clearly indicates the wrong use of some type of lossy audio compression. My guess would be that the audio encoding bit rate for the audio assets was set too low during code packaging.

When I moved from version 1.0.5 to 1.1.x it was immediately apparent while listening to the start-up theme, but all music (and probably other audio) is affected.

[sal_vager]

49 minutes ago, Kordo Kooper said:

I am running the Windows version of KSP natively in Windows (Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 x64), so I can't comment on that (it sounds like another issue).
However, to my ears the it clearly indicates the wrong use of some type of lossy audio compression. My guess would be that the audio encoding bit rate for the audio assets was set too low during code packaging.

When I moved from version 1.0.5 to 1.1.x it was immediately apparent while listening to the start-up theme, but all music (and probably other audio) is affected.

There were reports on this during pre-release but I wasn't able to determine any difference at the time between the Linux versions of 1.1 and 1.0.5, and I still can't, is this a really subtle change?

The effect I experienced while using Wine was extremely broken audio but that was caused by Wine itself, there was no mistaking there was an issue.

Can you record what you hear and upload it please.

[Guest]

 I've been hoping for an audio overhaul since sometime around .20 or .21. Good luck on this. The first thing I do with every new release is turn the game music off.  But that still doesn't help with the engine sounds and the weird sounds associated with staging in the map view. I've become convinced that these problems won't ever get fixed.

[Nerdman]

59 minutes ago, sal_vager said:

There were reports on this during pre-release but I wasn't able to determine any difference at the time between the Linux versions of 1.1 and 1.0.5, and I still can't, is this a really subtle change?

The effect I experienced while using Wine was extremely broken audio but that was caused by Wine itself, there was no mistaking there was an issue.

Can you record what you hear and upload it please.

To my ears the change in audio quality from version 1.0.5 was not subtle; it really sounds like the audio encoding in the 1.1.x version is a lot worse than in previous versions. I will setup a test with different versions and upload the results asap!

[Nerdman]

I've recorded the KSP theme song in version 1.0.5 build 1028 and also in version 1.1.2 build 1260 and uploaded them here (FLAC and MP3 versions):

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/5lauc1mkwzd9e3j/AABApg0P5P6KzePYSUfm9fXYa?dl=0

On 20/04/2016 at 4:41 AM, tater said:

Easy to replicate. Run 1.1 (1230) on a mac (I'm using yosemite, 10.10.5). Sound music is garbled.

Seems worse on loading screen. Sound elsewhere seems sorta normal... but different (and not in a good way).

I agree!