More Awesome Than You!

I am in the middle of playing my game and suddenly all the game sound shuts off: sound effects, neighborhood music, voices, etc. Has anyone else had this problem? I have both WA and AMB, plus HEL.

Yes, just one hour ago. Reloading the save did not help, reloading the game neither. I had to restart the computer and deleted that save. I've no idea, however, what it was. Has never happened before.

Yes same here.  Or else one sound gets stuck and very loud (usually the PC game or TV) and no other sounds play

Yeah.  Once.  Did not save, rebooted computer.

This happened to me when I invited a corrupt NPC over. The minute she walked onto the lot (I assume this is when the game loads her information), all sound cut off, save for loud buzzing in one of my speakers.

I had similar experience yesterday after playing for a short period; all sounds replaced with constant scratchy noise which made me first suspicious of my speakers or audio drivers. I saved and exited, as as the game was shutting down some sounds returned, as if there had been some lag in their output. I didn't have any audio problems with other applications. Rebooted and started playing again but no problem since with a couple of sessions.  I updated WinAmp recently and have uninstalled some extra plugin listed in the add/remove programs list since this problem, but I haven't played enough sessions lately to check whether the problem might still come back; I'd already disabled the WinAmp Agent that's supposed to prevent other applications from hijacking file associations. I'm running Vista 32-bit with "Realtek High Definition Audio" (some sort of built-in sound chip) and have it configured for vanilla stereo PC speakers; Sims 3 with World Adventures, latest EA patch and Awesomemod plus about 65 MB of other stuff in the new default Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3/Mods/Packages location, updated CFG file, no nested folders.

Have had sound issues off and on since installing Ambitions...suspect it's an EA thing. Waxing poetic here - I remember the old days in the first generation of this game when the sound would shut off - it was a sure sign of imminent CTD.

Anyway, elsewhere on these boards, our fearless leader had suggested using 'alt+tab' a couple times... so far, that or going to 'edit town' and back into the current played fambly has eventually restored the sound - although it makes a horrendous ruckus when it returns.

I was having the same thing, sounds would shut off or one of the background noises would get stuck looping, the game would also lag terribly while it was happening. It seemed to be related to sims using bicycles. I deleted all the bicycles my sims owned and it hasn't happened since.

Happened several times to me as well. There didn't seem to be any specific event that caused it though, or maybe there was and I didn't realize/notice it.

Alt+tab didn't work for me, plus I play in Windowed mode, so it shouldn't make any difference.

This just happened to me the other night when I last played. I thought it was my speakers or my sound card, so I saved and quit the game and opened up MediaMonkey. My music played fine, so I just figured it was another random game bug and I forgot about it until I saw this thread. I haven't played since then so I don't know if it will work again or not. I'm kind of suspecting my neighborhood is messed up because I've had other problems so I may just start over.

I lost sound when playing one time. I just kept playing and eventually the sound started working again.

I am having this in my game now more and more often. The first instance ever was two days ago, and since then it has happened several times. I almost got it to the point of being reproducible at Simtime Sunday morning around 9 am. But, of course, the fifth reload of the same save failed in that it did not occur again.
The whole thing is like a mitigated version of the game freeze that has been reported several times where everything freezes but ambient animations (trees swaying, plumbob spinning), while this time it's only the sound that gets stuck.
In two instances the stereo was playing when it froze, i.e., it continued to play even after I had switched programs and minimised TS3 into the Mac dock. Deleting the stereo from the household did not change anything, however. The only thing that got my game finally beyond that critical point was to not switch households. In fact, the very first time that I had this happen to me was after switching to several households one morning in order to send some truant children to school. So, maybe, it is caused by some failed action that is happening outside your current household.
I also noticed that the one save file that I tried to reload several times in order to find out what's causing this freeze had grown considerably in size by around 20MB.

Edit: Just had it again. After I could work around it the first time (it was again at around 9 a.m.) the sound feeze reappeared one Sim hour later, and this time there was nothing peculiar happening that could trigger it (Sim walked into library and then - sound gone, next try Sim is IN library already teaching toddler to walk - sound gone). I give up - this is the fifth attempt at establishing the same family in Twinbrook.

A clean install should fix that, just remember to keep your save files in a safe place, also try checking your game options, you may need to decrease the quality of sound, since it could be caused by your hardware.


If that doesn't work clean your ears well and try removing all of your mods (if you have any). Report back to tell us if you noticed anything.

I have a chronic case of this bug. I just play the game sans sound now. I usually only get about 10 minutes of sound before it cuts off anyway.

I've had this happen to me once, I had not noticed the sound shut off until suddenly every single sound that SHOULD have played all played at once in a loud and startling moment. I think I did a 'fixall' before then.

I just had this happen to me.

Situation as such.. bought 2 bikes, the smooth one(apologies that I cannot remember the whole name). Set preferred on both sims for their particular bike. Sent sim to China.
Sim rode bike in china.

Sim comes home.. Wife takes bike (his!) No sound.
Reboot.
Delete bike , one missing..delete the bike holders. Send Wife off to find other bike. It was not showing in inventory for whatever reason, and the sound died again.
Delete other bike , give a car. No issues.

Silly little eco sim is going to have to live with the darn bad moodlet.

I haven't experienced this sound problem, but I recall some time ago someone posted about sound issues, and identified the culprit as being the duplex/half-duplex drivers usually associated with dial-up modems.  A search should reveal the thread/posts and might help.

It may be nothing, but might be worth investigating as a possible cause.  Most laptops have these modems built-in and some desktop PC's also have them.

Well.. that would be interesting if I had a modem. That would be a correct situation in the case of the modem/soundcard combos of about 2003 and earlier.
I do have a sb24bit live, which in common knowledge is shit. It has as best updated drivers as one can give it for win7. (Thank goodness Creative did make some win 7 drivers) I doubt my motherboard soundcard would do much better as it does not have win7 drivers.

However the removal of bike use OF ADULTS removed the issue. I have no problems with kids running around on bikes.

I've also had this problem more often lately.  I'll just be playing randomly and all of a sudden the sound goes off.  It'll go on for less than 5 minutes, then come blaring back on again.  It seems to happen more often to me when I play large houses with big families.  I'm playing a single-person family now and I haven't had any problems so far.

Seems like a random EA bug to me - people have been complaining about sound issues since Ambitions came out.

There were complaints here before Ambitions came out about sound problems.

It started happening to me since about a week ago. Weird, since I didn't install any new CC or patch when it started. Like some other people had experienced here, the sound would all gone suddenly after playing for a while and when it comes back, all the sounds will play together, as if there's a lag. Sometimes going to buy/build mode will fix it, or going to CAS with editsim cheat. I haven't tried going to edit town but going back to main menu and reloading the save wouldn't fix it.

I've had this problem once before, I think a month ago but I went to vacation with my sims family and the sound came back ??? Now it happened me again and I'll restart and see what happends... ::) But all sounds wasn't gone, when my girl-sim played at her computer there was the game-sound?

Please try lowering sound quality in options. After a re-install it was automatically set to high in my game and I had these sound issues, too. Then I set the quality to Low, which does not mean that it sounds worse. Only less sounds are being played at the same time. This solved the problem for me.

I had this problem too and even asked the EA support for help  ::) They adviced me to create a new user account on my pc and play the game from there, and it actually works.

I've been experiencing this bug quite often and from my learnings I think that adults using bikes exacerbates the issue, but doesn't cause it. With one family who only have the cheap car, and don't own any bikes, I had this bug occasionally, but with a bike-owning sim it happens every couple of minutes. Also, I noticed that some people are saying the sound comes back on eventually and some people say the game crashes when the sound goes. For me, it's either/or, randomly, so I just save immediatly whenever it happens and then reload. I just had my 5th crash in 30 minutes so I just sold the bike and set the the sound quality to low, as Entgleichen suggested and will see if that helps.

I have this problem, too, which appeared just *after* installing Ambitions. It might be something wrong with the neighbourhood though, because the game is fully patched, and further testing --I sent one of the families to China-- the sound problem did not occur there at all, not even once. *shrug*

Right after I read this thread I also got the bug. So what did I do? I ignored it and continued my normal playing. But I have to say there have been only two situations like this. And also when the sound returns, it does have a deafening effect.
By posting this I probably jinxed it.

I haven't had the bug once since lowering sound quality and removing bikes. You might want to try that.

Thanks, smellyarmando. I will give it a try next time and see if this stops the crashing -- although it does not happen every single time the sound problem appears.

EDIT: I tried it but it did not work for me.

Well, I don't have any bikes for my sims and I have the sound going out.  I lowered the sound quality and it helped, but didn't stop it entirely.

I have noticed when I have the task manager open on my second monitor that when the sound goes out, the CPU usage jumps from approx. 50-55% to 100% and stays there for awhile.  When the sound starts again, the usage drops back down.  I'm beginning to suspect a memory leak somewhere.

I had this sound drop-out (more like lag) issue last night, and unsurprisingly, going off what people have already said on here, I have an adult sim who rides a bike. However, I also noticed that at 3am when the game runs its usual 'hood maintenance, all the sound came back - as one huge cacophonic mess that lasted nearly a minute. Basically, it was every possible audio instance that should have played out throughout the day compressed into a minute of eardrum-destroying noise. After that, the audio behaved as normal.

I seem to recall this happening before, shortly after installing Ambitions, but I haven't really played the game properly for a while until last night.

It's just another entry in a long list of bugs that EA will sweep under the rug, along with the broken lights, the running glitch and countless others that I keep coming across but quickly forget.

Did you lower sound quality to "Low" or "Middle"?


Yea, that's what I've discovered, too.

Tried both.  Tried the middle setting first, then the low setting.  Still have sound shutting off.

Tried a couple of things last night.  I read where someone suggested changing the speaker options.  Mine are set at 2.0 basic speaker setup.  When I got to the game select screen, I tried changing it to 4. whatever and the game actually loaded faster.  Once the game was loaded, I changed it back to 2.0.  I didn't have sound problems right away like I have been, but they did start again.  So I changed to the 4.0, and the sound came back pretty fast, but cut out again.  I'm going to play around with it a little tonight and see if I can find a setting that works halfway decent.

I've also had some problems with my mouse.  Click on something and I get an unrelated pie chart or that the item is unselectable.  So I also was checking my video card settings to see if there was anything there.  There was a setting for advance frame rendering that said if there were problems with the mouse pointer to reduce the value.  So I did that, too. (After I had loaded the above-mentioned game.)

My thinking on the advance frame rendering was that maybe it was taking too much memory, but the setting is on the GPU, not the CPU.  It did help the mouse clicking, though.

I was having the no-sound issue since the last Ambitions patch. Here is what a guru on ea forums yesterday told me to do and it actually worked for me.

Problem source link: http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/257198.page

1. Click Start or press the Windows key and R, click Run, type msconfig, and then click OK.

2. Click on Startup.

3. Select disable All.

4. Click on Services.

5. Check the box that says Hide All Microsoft Services, then Disable All.

6. Apply, then restart your system.

Attempt to run the game. This will eliminate most of what might be interfering with TS3 running properly on a software level. Once you're done, repeat the above procedure, using the Enable All buttons to turn services and startup items back on.

-Big Guy-

I only tested it for 1 (human) game hour, but that was enough since it was cutting out on me around 15 minutes of gameplay. Hopefully, this will work for everyone that's having this issue. Moral of the story: Kill every startup/service that isn't Micro$ucks related before loading the game.

That is really fucking stupid, it sounds like something from EA, or alternately Microsoft. While yeah, it does reduce any possible conflict in a "raze it all" kind of way, most peoples computers do not reply on just their shit, and there is a lot of other useful things that don't come from either of them. Yeah, that is a really great idea! Tell all the sheeple to disable their virus scanners and other net security items, and not tell them they need to re-enable those! Unless you know what you are turning off, you probably shouldn't. What is a good idea? Open up msconfig and on occasion weed through it by hand, plus use of google if needed, and remove things that do not necessarily need to open at start-up. Same with services, not all are needed, some do shit you want to keep. You don't even need to just shut it all off like they are telling you to, you can just set the crap to manual in services.msc. Then they only open up when a program calls for that service. Note that Apples ipod services don't seem to agree with this tactic.
Just open up Windows Task Manager and end task anything you aren't using if the rest is beyond you. Most things that need to be running will pop back up and shit that you really shouldn't close will just restart the computer. Actually learn what those processes are.
That's great that that worked for you, but do you know what all you closed up? I bet that the majority of people that he gave that advice to have no idea.

No shit!  That was my thought, too.

It sounds like another way of saying, "EWE NEED MOAR RAMZ!"

Or it's an excuse for their lousy programming.

Either way, no thanks.  It's probably their spyware trying to phone home that's doing it.  When it can't do its job, it fills up your CPU and cuts out the sound.

Bleah.

Killing "every" service sounds like you're killing those dodgy Sound Card Driver services that installs with your sound card, since TS3 doesn't run any such services. And yes, those unnecessary sound card programs probably DO cause grief.

Yes, and I should know better. The culprit was my creative xfi crap that I forgot to disable after updating.

Well, I found a couple of sims that were stuck.  One was out in her yard and couldn't move past the sculpting station for some reason, so I used resetsim on her. Another sim in the same household was at the hospital, (just visiting?) and when I tried to send her home, she wouldn't go.  When I zoomed in on her, she had a police cruiser (family vehicle) that kept trying to get around her.  I used resetsim on her, too, which sent her home, but the car was still trying to stick to her.  I deleted the car since there were two in that household and one of them was from a sim that had died.

Since then, I haven't had any sound problems to speak of.  Maybe once or twice for a second or two out of several hours of gameplay.

Hopefully, this fixed my sound problems.  Might be worthwhile just checking on sims in households you're not currently playing, just in case.

I can definitely confirm this as well. Seems to happen with children riding personally owned bikes as well as adults. Sound goes wonky, game slows down to a crawl. if you save the game in this state, it stays in that bugged state. EA strikes again! I looked all over the web before I found this forum which actually addressed this issue. Not even EA's tech support forums have anything reporting this one. Note: If a kid rides the default npc-pool bike, this issue does not happen. Dunno so much about adults. I usually get them Kenspas for traveling around China for example. Issue doesn't seem to happen with Kenspas.

-Dog

I updated the game three days ago. For the records, the sound problem seems to happen in a lesser degree after installing the latest patches. 

Has anyone tried lowering the sound quality without doing anything to the bikes, and seeing if that helps?

I have and this just results in the bug occuring slightly less frequently than doing nothing at all, for me. It still seems to happen no matter what, but doing both (ditching bikes and lowering sound quality) lowers the frequency to tolerable levels. YMMV, though.

So this problem is back in my game, and I don't have any bike in the lot. Happened on multiple neighborhoods so it's not the hood that is borked.

It's funny, I just had it come back in my game a few days ago, had to search for a solution, and the only one that worked was the one I posted, last year, right above yours. Lowering sound quality worked like a charm. You might also want to get twallan's Overwatch because it shuts off unused TV's and radios in your hood and this also seems to help in my game. I still get the bug but it's much rarer after taking those two steps.

I've only had this problem when there are too many bicycles going around in my neighborhood. Nuking the bikes always fixed the problem. Twoftmama made a mod to kill bike sounds here (http://www.the-isz.com/theisz/index.php?/topic/6566-shut-the-flock-up-sound-effects-new-flavor-added-july-10-2011/) and it seems to be working wonderfully for me.

Two Foot Mama has recently added a STFU for the Bicycle sounds. I might add that for me it is working wonderfully, I have bicycles all over the Map now, and no more Sound hangs. Note You can not get to this link unless you have a Crazy Town Account.

http://www.the-isz.com/theisz/index.php?/topic/6566-shut-the-flock-up-sound-effects-new-flavor-added-july-10-2011/ (http://www.the-isz.com/theisz/index.php?/topic/6566-shut-the-flock-up-sound-effects-new-flavor-added-july-10-2011/)