Audio is glitchy on Linux after update

[happysmash27]

I just opened Gear City for the first time in about a year. Currently the audio of the music sounds glitchy and stuttery, like the sample rate is mismatched or something like that. I do not remember it sounding like this before.

This is running under PulseAudio through Jack on Linux. The sample rate is 96000 hz, 2048 Frames/Period, 2 Periods/Buffer. I run this script upon start of LXDE to pipe Pulseaudio through the jack audio server:

Code:

#!/bin/sh
killall pulseaudio
sleep 1
pacmd load-module module-jack-sink channels=2
pacmd load-module module-jack-source
pactl set-default-sink jack_out

Have there been any changes to the audio since the version from April 27th 2023 that might cause this?

[happysmash27]

Only shortly after posting this, I was able to find what seems to be the cause of it and a workaround. I noticed libopenal.so.1 was last modified on November 19th at 18:54, more recently than most other files which were last updated on March 11th 2022. I renamed it so it would not be read and moved my system libopenal.so.1 (version 1.21.1, last updated in January 2022) to the Gear City folder and now the audio is perfect.

[Eric.B]

2nd Gear now ships with the libs in upcoming Debian 10-based Steam Runtimes. I wondered if they made any custom modifications. It's working fine on three of my Mageia 9 machines.

If anything, regular GearCity should also include the older libs. You could try copying libopenal.so.1 from there into the 2nd Gear folder.

If you could let me know the distro and version, that will help. Also, if anyone else runs into this issue, please let me know distros and versions. If I don't roll my own, I can push a fix or a bug report upstream.

[happysmash27]

This was in regular GearCity rather than the FBS, which I have not installed yet (still playing the very long save game from last year). So, regular GearCity seems to have the newer OpenAL lib too.

This is on Gentoo Linux. Versioning is complicated, since Gentoo is rolling release; my kernel is 5.19.3-gentoo, and since trying to update everything usually ends up failing, some of the system libraries are older while many other package are newer. OpenAL is currently on the outdated version 1.21.1-r2, pulseaudio-daemon is version 16.1-r6, the Pulseaudio meta package is on the latest version 16.1, jack2 is on the latest version 1.9.22, and alsa-lib is on version 1.2.9. If the libraries are newer, than perhaps it might help to update all libraries it depends on. Maybe if I updated OpenAL it would also update anything it depends on and could make for a better test.

[Eric.B]

The libopenal bundled with base GC has not been changed. The one bundled with the game is still a June 20th, 2012 copy bundled with Ubuntu 12 (Steam's old runtime.)

So, likely it's a system update that is breaking with such an old version of OpenAL.

You should be able to remove that file, and the game will use either the libopenal bundled with whichever Steam runtime you launch the game with or your system libraries.

You could also try 2nd Gear and see if the audio works there. That one should be defaulting to Steam's or your system's automatically.

[Eric.B]

I should point out that launching the game via Steam should override your system libraries with whichever runtime you have selected. The base runtime for Steam is Ubuntu12, but they have launched Betas of Debian 10, 11, and 12. Regular GC bundled a few libraries that were newer than Ubuntu12 or that I needed something not supported in Ubuntu12. Nonetheless, any dependencies for the OpenAL should come from Steam's runtime libraries, including sound libraries.

I used to keep an assortment of Linux Distros around for testing, but I got old and lazy, and now everything is Mageia, FreeBSD, or Net BSD.


On my Mageia systems, Pulse is on 16.1-16, Alsa is at 1.2.9, and Jack2 is on 1.9.21. And I haven't had any other reports from anyone else lately. But I will ping a few people I know on other distros and see if they had any issues.


If you could throw a game log up here, I'd like to see some details on your sound hardware.