EvaUnit02 on 24/5/2009 at 14:56

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There is a widespread problem where there's a shitty stutter during the songs on radio stations (usually not the announcer bits). It's most commonly a problem for those running Vista + a Creative-based sound card (ie X-Fi and Audigy). It only seems to affect songs encoded in MP3, not OGG Vorbis (you'll find that some fan-made radio station mods use OGGs, all of the vanilla ones use MP3).

Fallout 3 uses DirectSound rather than OpenAL. DS3D was removed from Vista as it's commonly known. This is entirely a codec issue externally to the game itself and highly likely can't be fixed by a patching the game without extensively rewriting the code.

Creative Solution

Use ALchemy, Creative's OpenAL wrapper for X-Fi's and Audigy's. ALchemy works natively supports only Vista, but will work flawlessly under XP too with a little extra work.

N.B. ALchemy can also restore the broken 5.1 support when running under Vista.

I'll make things a lot simpler, here (http://rapidshare.com/files/259486357/Fallout_3_-_Creative_radio_stutter_fix.zip.html) I've uploaded the pre-configured ALchemy files (dsound.dll + dsound.ini). Extract those to your main Fallout 3 directory.

The long way, for Vista:-

Launch the installed Creative ALchemy application (download it from (http://www.soundblaster.com/alchemy/) here, if you don't already have it.)

Add a new profile, using the following settings:-

Registry path:-

Vista x64:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Bethesda Softworks\Fallout3\Installed Path

Vista 32-bit:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Bethesda Softworks\Fallout3\Installed Path

Then use these values for the proceeding fields:-

Buffers=6
Duration=5
MaxVoiceCount=128

DisableDirectMusic= unchecked

((http://www.bethsoft.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=893405&view=findpost&p=13076983) source)

The long way, for XP:-

1. Download ALchemy.
2. Download and install 7-Zip or WinRAR and use either to subtract the installer (i.e. ALMY_PCVTAPP_LB_1_25_10.exe) to a temporary folder. (When you installed either of those extractor programs, they should've added extract options to the right-click contents sensitive menu.)
3. Go into the extracted subfolder \Alchemy\ and open Bin.cab (using an extractor program, like one of the aforementioned).
4. Within Bin.cab's \TargetDir\ you'll find dsound.dll, extract that somewhere where you'll find it like your Desktop.
5. Move dsound.dll to your main Fallout 3 directory.
6. Go to your main Fallout 3 directory and create a new blank text file. Rename it to dsound.ini.
7. Open up dsound.ini and copy and paste the following:-



8. Save the changes made to dsound.ini.

You can now delete all of the temporary extracted folders.

Radio stutter fix for non-Creative hardware (eg Asus Xonar, Realtek):-

This entails installing a new DirectShow filter, MAD.



((http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=844931) source)

An alternative work-around (ALL audio hardware):-

Increase the size of Fallout 3's audio cache, it does noticeably reduce the radio song stutter. Increase the values of iAudioCacheSize and iMaxSizeForCachedSound found in your fallout.ini. (XP location:- \Documents and settings\[username]\My Documents\My Games\Fallout3\ - Vista location:- \Users\[username]\Documents\My Games\Fallout3\)

Personally I used the following values, you'll want to experiment with them.



Please refer to the Audio section (http://www.tweakguides.com/Fallout3_10.html) on this page of the Tweakguides.com Fallout 3 Guide for further details on this work-around.