Audio is "lagging out"

[ReclusEndangrmnt]

Hi there, first post

Wanted to start by saying this is such an awesome program, me and my friends enjoy playing up some music while playing up some Left 4 Dead, and it's better than my predecessor; a guy playing music through a laptop, over his mic

For the most part I've had no problems what so ever, I converted files as per the requirements, and with the exception of an occasional hiccup (only on my end, the others hear constant audio), the audio has been clean (for what it is, of course).

However, starting yesterday the audio suddenly began stuttering, playing fine for a couple of seconds and then dying out, dropping all together, and then coming back in at a faster playback rate as if to catch up. The others are noticing this.

I have been converting my files using the batch processing tutorial, and with iTunes...Both processes work fine but I've reverted to Goldwave, for the batch processing. I have tried a fresh copy of HLDJ, the new beta, even removing some files (I figured it was having trouble keeping up with the quantity of files), and well now laptop guy might get his job back

We have a dedicated server and, to test, I have tried playing audio on other servers, to no effect.

Playing Single Player on L4D has unaltered audio, so I'm wondering if its a connection issue...Although I haven't had any problems before (and I have a fiber connection, so yeah)...Don't suppose anyone has any tips?

[Renegade]

Yep, this seems to occur randomly at times in L4D. They've dropped the voice_fadeouttime cvar (HLDJ sets this to 0 to fix voice stuttering aka "fadeout"), so not much can be done other than trying to improve the connection, trying a different server, or hoping that it eventually corrects itself.

[ReclusEndangrmnt]

When you say improve the connection, would you be referring to tweaking the cl_cmd/update rates?

[Renegade]

Yep, ("rate" as well), and any external factors affecting bandwidth. Generally though, the network cvars in Source shouldn't require tweaking. You can enable "net_graph 3" to check that ping/choke/loss is reasonable.

Just some general strategies though - no guarantees. I've found it's almost entirely random (and fortunately, rare).