Symptoms- Sound starts out normal, then dies during gameplay all of a sudden. Music continues.
My specs:

P4. 3.0 GHz, HT
1024 MB RAM
ATI Radeon X300SE PCI-E
Sounblaster Live! Series

Heres an update. I was playing a skirmish today and everything started out fine apart from the stuttering/clicking sounds when sounds are heard. About 5 minutes into the game, my sound cut out. However i could hear the sound when switching back and forth from my home city (the only sound was the one you get when you press a menu button.) eventually, this disappeared. After about 10-20 minutes, the music stopped. I played the game for about 45 minutes with no sound or music. I attacked the enemy's town hall and then battle music started. shortly after, i won the game. I returned to the main menu and there was sound, then i quit. There's today's experience.

http://aoe3.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/forums/display.cgi?action=ct&f=11,23722,0,10

That fix fixed my problem.

Same i have the same sound pronblem but my friend doesnt. I reinstaled didnt help... dont know what to do i am going to have one of my moder friends look at it tonight makes reborn mod for cc he should beable to fix it.

JPinsk29:
What exactly is acceleration? Do you know if users will experience downgrades (of sound) in other areas of the game? in other games?

i have no sound completely, never had it. reinstalled a few times and still dont have sound.

amd 2400xp
9600xt
1gb ram
integraded sound.

Guess I'll post here too since I don't see any 'official' reaction. Hopefully some kind of patch to fix the demo, in light of so many issues with it. Same symptoms here, game sounds turn into a series of beeps and squeals and then computer hard boots. If I exit the game while the noises are occuring, the computer reboots when I reach the desktop. No other games with this problem.

Tried disabling DirectSound acceleration and works okay tho does CTD randomly. I am thinking it is a combination of our sound blaster cards and maybe something else?

My Specs from dxdiag:

Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2 (2600.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: MICRO-STAR INTERNATIONAL CO., LTD
System Model: MS-7125
BIOS: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+, MMX, 3DNow, ~1.8GHz
Memory: 1024MB RAM
Page File: 226MB used, 2197MB available
Windows Dir: D:\WINDOWS
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
DX Setup Parameters: Not found
DxDiag Version: 5.03.2600.2180 32bit Unicode
---------------
Display Devices
---------------
Card name: NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT
Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Chip type: GeForce 6600 GT
DAC type: Integrated RAMDAC
Device Key: Enum\PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0140&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_A2
Display Memory: 128.0 MB
Current Mode: 1280 x 1024 (32 bit) (75Hz)
Monitor: IBM P260
Monitor Max Res: 1920,1440
Driver Name: nv4_disp.dll
Driver Version: 6.14.0010.7801 (English)
-------------
Sound Devices
-------------
Description: SB Audigy 2 ZS Audio [AC00] (emulated)

My symptoms are basically the same as Sifka4's - sound glitches during cutscenes and gameplay, sometimes no sound at all, crashes to desktop. And the cutscene always either crashes to desktop after some time or it just stops and I have to press space to skip it.

My Specs:
- P4 1.8 Ghz
- 768 MB PC133-SDRAM
- GeForceFX 5900xt (128 MB)
- C-Media CMI8738 on-board sound

Reducing or turning off sound hardware acceleration in Windows didn't help at all.

I have the accursed Sound Blaster Live! Dell Edition, the one with the headphone jack at the front of the tower. It has EAX "emulation" in firmware and has had compatibility problems before. I'm long overdue to cough up $$$ for a 100% genuine SB me thinks.

I tossed Dell drivers in favor of newer ones by Creative, they do reduce glitches somewhat but AOE3 is the first time I've had sound problems in two years.

Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 Digital (Dell), DR release 1.1.100

Update:

Fell back to DirectX basic then standard acceleration. Didn't help.

Quoted from DXDIAG:

[This message has been edited by Thorney (edited 09-09-2005 @ 10:34 PM).]

Thorney:

I believe that my soundcard is also a Dell edition SB Live card. I remember when i updated drivers, they had drivers for the normal version, and the dell version. Since i have a dell i picked the dell version.

For the rest of you...what make is your computer? Maybe if alot of us have Dells it could be some different internal issue? maybe?

My 3D games slow down stop and start running again...

Operating System: Windows XP Pro
System Manufacturer: Compaq
System Model: PRESARIO 5400US
BIOS: 686P9 v1.11
Processor: Intel(r) Celeron(TM) CPU 1200MHz
Memory: 256MB RAM
Page File: 380MB used, 621MB available
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904

Device
Name: NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500
Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Chip Type: GeForce FX 5500
DAC Type: Integrated RAMDAC
Approx. Total Memory: 128.0 MB
Current Display Mode: 1024 x 768(32 bit)(60Hz)

http://aoe3.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/forums/display.cgi?action=ct&f=11,23763,0,30

Update:

I just tried toying with the hardware acceleration once i lost my sound and it did not help at all :\. Once i quit to the menu i still had no sound. Keep checking back here guys, thanks.

Play a skirmish for about 2 minutes then lose all Gaming sounds. Music still plays in the background but then I lose it about 20 minutes later normally.

I wish ES would give us some feedback on this.

It's not just Sound Blaster Live!s. My Audigy 1 is also suffering the sound cutout/occasional desktop crash.

FWIW, I am experiencing the same thing and I have a Dell wit SB Live!.

This is what I tried: I dropped sound acceleration to Standard and then still had the sound cutout problem. I lowered again to Basic and I just played over 38 mins (Fast speed) with no apparent sound problems. Great to get that far and hear the sound of battle.

Conky

Looks like sound blaster could be a prob. I Have a shit crap piece of crap sound card which was £5/$10 and AoE3 sounds run fine.

If it would be a Soundblaster problem I wouldn't have it.

Im going to try lowering mine.. Hopefully it will work!

UPDATE: Before playing, i put hardware accel to basic and i played an entire game with sound!! However, i played for about 45 minutes and right when i went to attack the enemy's base, i got a CTD so i dont know what the deal with that was, but at least i had sound the whole game!

i tired lowering the hardware too but it still does not work.

I just played for 50 minutes with Full Sound after moving mine to Basic!

sounds good..enjoy Hopefully ES will address this and maybe tell us exactly what the problem is...ive never had to deal with hardware accel before..

and note that although i do maintain sound/music, i still get random clicks behind some sounds :\ mostly during cutscenes though

[This message has been edited by Sifka4 (edited 09-10-2005 @ 02:55 PM).]

My symptoms:

I have yet to experience any crashes with the demo
Music and sound effects work fine
BUT:
In the campaign, every time a person speaks, they start out the sentence but never finish it. For example, onscreen it says "Major Cooper: We'd better get some men out to all the Trading Posts to help defend them", but the dialogue I hear is "We'd better get some men out to all the Trading Posts to help defe-"
This happens to EVERY SINGLE SPOKEN LINE OF DIALOGUE in the game, including those spoken by the old coot and Amelia Black. And it's just dialogue, all other sound effects like ginshots, animals, the things the units say when selected, etc. work fine...

And, is it just me, or are the graphics not as good as in the videos es has on the site and in the screenshots? I think it has something to do with pixel shaders, but I'm so ignorant of all these things... can someone tell me whether the ATI X700 PRO card has a pixel shader? Thanks.

I hope ES hears our complaints, cuz I was seriously hoping AoE3 to be WAY better than this...

Getting er keeping sound now with basic acceleration.

I still get partial dropouts during extended games or heavy battles. That is, there's unit speech, ambient noise from buildings, upgrade completed sounds, so forth and I lose some of these "channels" from time to time.

Something I found helpful as a quick and dirty fix. Alt tab out of AOE3 and play a sound with another app that uses DirectSound. This appears to force a DirectSound reset when returning to AOE3 and I get full sound restored. Pain in the butt but it works.