[L4D] Audio degrading after playing a song for a while

[Badm]

I have had zero problems with HLDJ (no errors or anything), no problems with my mic, and no problems with converted audio quality either. I use audacity to convert my audio, but I have tested this and I get the same problem with Goldwave or the HLDJ built-in audio converter. (And btw I find Audacity conversion sounding better than any of those Goldwave presets around the forum, they sound too sharp while audacity is smooth.)

The problem is that after a while of playing the same song (around 1 or 2 minutes or so, can't remember exactly), the audio starts seriously degrading and sounding kind of like you were listening to a radio station with a weak signal. The problem goes away if I just stop playing the clip, so it seems to be caused by the long and continuous play.

All of this happens in L4D1 and L4D2, so I decided to test if I would have this problem in TF2 (which I don't play anymore though). I found out however, that in TF2 the audio would have a slight pause every 30 seconds, and the audio wouldn't degrade after being played for a while and would retain the same quality all the way to the end.

So I'm just interested in hearing if it's like this for everyone (with the differences between the games) or if is it something unusual. It's not that big of a deal that I can't play the song till the end, but it'd be nice of course if I could fix it.

[uggron]

I think I remember having a similar problem in L4D2. It was like... if I went too far away from where I had originally started playing the song it got all messed up, but every now and then it refreshed or something, and started working fine, until I moved a certain distance again. Possibly, the game uses 3D sound for voice communication, but it only updates your position occasionally so the sounds keeps playing from the one spot. Normally that wouldn't be a problem because you're only communicating for a few seconds and can't really move that far in that much time, but when you're playing a song and it drags on for however many minutes...

Anyways, as for actual help, all I can do for you is point you here but there's not likely to be anything pertaining to your particular problem. Still, make sure you examine it thoroughly, just in case.

[Renegade]

In most other games, this fading out over time is affected by the cvar 'voice_fadeouttime'; HLDJ sets this to 0 (for no fade out); however this cvar has been removed in the left 4 dead games so there's not much that can be done. sometimes it happens and sometimes it's fine.

[uggron]

Oh. Well my theory sounded intelligent at least.