Music abruptly stops, sound corruption

Greetings,

I've been working on a game for the past year. It has gone through multiple file versions as well as releases of Construct 2 with no issue. The game is usually tested on firefox and windows phone 8.

Today I wanted to test my game in firefox and internet explorer and I noticed music abruptly gets cut off after about 2 seconds. Progressing through the game I'll get random degradation of sound effects as well. This is the same file I worked and tested on last week with no issues.

I was using thehen's windows phone tutorial as my way of playing sounds and music using functions (awesome tutorial by the way, go check it out, I don't have permissions to post the link, sorry).

Things I've tried:

Updated to the latest Construct

Downgraded to Construct 136

Tried a different computer

Tried files from 5 months back

Replaced a music file with a different one

Loaded a completely different game using the same functions

Results:

Updating or downgrading Construct did not help

Trying a different computer gave me the same results for the game.

Trying old files rendered same problems.

Replacing the music file still stopped.

! Testing a different game had no problems. Music was fine.

I'm scratching my head. Does this mean the game files that were great from 5 months ago to last week have all been corrupted as of today?

My suspicion is the game file. But I'm really confused by it. The whole idea of archiving files is to have a fall back plan. But to see old files from months ago behave as odd as the newest file throws me for a loop.

Any thoughts will be greatly appreciated.

Hi anyone. I think I found a workaround. I dragged all of my music files from my Music folder to my Sounds folder - Thus treating my music as sfx.

I've been testing the game and no weirdness as a result. I sincerely hope I'm the only one that had this problem. If not, hope it helps if you run into this weirdness.

Which browsers are affected specifically? If you're testing in Firefox, then Firefox 25 introduced a bug where music could distort and/or cut out. We implemented a workaround in r152 so it shouln't happen any more. I don't think any other browsers were affected.

Hi Ashley,

Thanks - Your info on the browsers has kept me from pulling the remaining hair from my scalp. After reading your reply I thought I'd some quick tests for you.

I ran my game in build 148 using firefox and IE. Results were:

firefox 25.0.1 - Music cuts out. Sfx had no incidents.

IE 10.0.9200.16736 - Music sounds warbled as if listening through a tin can. Sfx were executed with a slight delay. It almost seemed as though they were trying to cache and/or stream to memory first. For example, on my menu screen I have a button make a sound when tapped. On first tap, slight delay. On second tap same button, perfectly synced. I could probably preload all sounds I guess? But I dont have a solution (yet?) for the warbly music.

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Then, running in build 152:

firefox 25.0.1 - Flawless, back to normal!

IE 10.0.9200.16736 - Same as build 148, warbly music, delayed sfx as above.

The main thing is learning that these issues are browser specific. I feel a lot better knowing that. I might do these tests with another game I'm working on as well. I'm curious if IE is grumpy with any and all exports etc... I typically test with firefox before sending to wp8.

I had an issue once with sound that is now fixed. My game was set up in the following way

Logo Splash

-Music is preloaded

Title Page

-Music begins at start of layout and loops

Levels

-Music is allowed to continue to loop unless the "EXIT" menu option was chosen at the end of the stage. I had an event that ended the music before heading back to the Logo Splash layout.

What ended up happening was that the music would cut out randomly in between the levels depending on how quickly the user selected the menu items. It was almost as if the events got tangled somehow.

In order to fix this I had to move the "music stop looping" event to the beginning of the Logo Splash, so that when a player selected "EXIT" and returned to the Logo Splash layout, it would stop the music then and not effect the sound in between levels.

Not sure if this at all has anything to do with what is going on with your project, but just wanted to show you that you may just have to mix up your events in a different manner to get the end result.

-Mike

Hi Nutzaboutpoker,

I don't think we have the same issues with music when comparing our posts. But thanks for the info - Any solution dealing with the music/sfx realm is always helpful to have in the tool box.