Sound Troubleshooting
This page describes how to fix various sound problems with Baldur's Gate and Tales of the Sword Coast.
To avoid sound problems, make sure your sound drivers are the latest versions and DirectX compliant. Interplay has listed drivers known to work for each card on their Hardware Configuration page.
Baldur's Gate features sounds that are directional and fade off into the distance. If you have 32 MB of RAM or more, you will get longer, more detailed versions on the ambient sounds. There are about 1400 distinct sounds in the game not including voices. Scott Grieg (Programming Director) explained the sound format for people that plan to customize their sounds:
Baldur's Gate will handle .wav files of any format. Anything better that 22k 16-bit just gets sampled down (which has a performance hit) and anything worse won't sound as good. We use mono sounds for the characters because of the panning effect. Stereo sounds will still work but will be sampled down the mono (once again a performance hit)...All of our sounds are recorded by Interplay at a professional sound studio and mastered with some high end programs.
3D sound is supported using the EAX standard of Creative Labs. However, EAX has been causing crashes, usually citing an error in EMU10K1. Turn off EAX under Options/Sound and see if this improves the game's stability. A new Soundblaster Live! driver (ctmm16.drv v 1.03) came out on 11/25/98 for Win95/98 that was expected to fix the crashing issues.
For the smaller installs, only one default male and one female sound set are included. For the larger installations, 3 additional sounds sets each for males and females are included. The provided sounds are not complete, lacking the Rare Selected 1-4, Character Death Reactions, and Area Triggered Sounds that can be heard with NPCs or Custom PC sounds. As summed up by Luke Kristjanson (Lead Writer):
These were left out because they go a long
way to defining the mannerisms of a character, and
we didn't want to cloud anyone's view of who they
want to play. They are intentionally generic, though
we have also tried to make each one distinct.
If you do not have the custom sound set from another person in a multiplayer game, Baldur's Gate will use the default sound set. You must email your sounds to the other players before starting the game.
If you have a MX200 sound card and character sounds are not playing, double click on the Monster Sound icon in the system tray, select preferences, and turn off acceleration. If the problem persists, you will want to switch your drivers to the manufacturer of the chipset (ie. Aureal).
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