Music Control and environmental sounds issue

A couple of days before the last SL client update, Music Control and environmental sounds stopped working. The odd thing is sound for Movie Control still works. The client upgrade did not solve the issue, retinstalled completely the new client, emptied caches, checked that is was not muted in configuration (the Music Control still comes up on screen). And all other apps on the machine that use sound work ok. I also created a seperate user account just for SL but the sound issue remains.

I am running OSX 10.4.4 now after the latest software update from apple and running the latest SL client.

Live help did not have any suggestions beyond what I have tried already and referred me to this forum.

Any ideas?

Thank you.

I posted here about having the same problem:

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It works OK on my iBook but suddenly stopped doing sounds on my iMac G5. What kind of Mac are you using? Did sounds ever come back for you?

I have a Mac mini with 1gb RAM, and it worked fine with SL until the sound stopped like on you iMac G5. I have not gotten sound back on the Mac. Will be trying the latest client this evening but I am not confident it will help the issue any.

Has anyone submitted a bug report on this? Perhaps I will do that again with the new client too.

It appears that once the SL sound stops working on a Mac, you are out of luck. After reading through your posting, it seems the identical problem is happening across multiple Mac models so it would appear the problem is a software and not a hardware issue. The movie control uses Quicktime to operate, I am not sure what SL uses for music and environmental sounds, but it would make sense that the helper program the runs it is having an issue.

The component that plays enviro sounds and streaming audio in SL is called FMOD. It's a commonly used library. It's definitely not across the board though, my Dual 2.3 tower is doing fine - I have to say I'm no big fan of FMOD though. It seems really touchy w/ streams, and wav files are unpredictable - I really hate the sound options available in SL (being a musician and sound designer) - though most of the worst parts are not likely problems inherent in FMOD itself.

Thanks for that news, Kaklick. Do you know of another program, ideally a free download, that uses FMOD for its sounds? It would be interesting to see if that program also fails to create sound effects. I found some obscure little game called World of Warfare or something like that, it uses FMOD too, but it didn't have a free download.

If you go to fmod.org and click on Links it shows a bunch of companies that are using FMOD, including LL, but I didn't find any yet that have a Mac version, except for that one I mentioned from Buzzard entertainment or whatever. I'll keep looking. Thanks again for the tip!

I have a little more news, but it's not too good. I was able to download the FMOD library from fmod.org, which includes some sample programs. They are very simple and just use a couple of the FMOD functions. Building those programs, they work fine on my iBook but fail on the iMac. The error message is "Error initializing output device". I also found this same error message in the Second Life log file in ~/Library/Application Support/SecondLife/logs/SecondLife.log.

So it appears that whatever is going wrong, it is something in the FMOD sound library and not SL specific. I posted a message on the FMOD forum a couple days ago but so far haven't got any responses. Unfortunately it is a closed-source program so I don't know what I can do to try to fix it.

The bottom line is that the iMac somehow got into a state where the FMOD library gets this error, while other sound-producing programs work fine. I still hope that the FMOD people will eventually pay attention to this problem.

To follow up on this, I want to mention that my SL sounds have started working again on the iMac. I don't think I changed anything! Not even an SL update. I guess whatever was broken just started working again.

Hi

I've also suffered from this loss of sound in SL. When I use a different application that changes the sample and bit rates...SL then has absolutely no sound. I have tried the Audio/midi box change the rate fix...but I still have no sound in SL. The only that seems to fix this for me is rebooting about 10 times!

I'm using an Intel Mac 2.16 Ghz duo core with Mac OS X 10.4.11

This issue is especially annoy as I am a musician and often change sound cards and setting in the course of my work.

Any comprehensive help gratefully received!!