Left 4 Dead <-> HLDJ

[asaguda]

So I set my HLDJ up and converted my files with Audacity and tried playing them in TF2. All worked fine. Sound was decent, some lag (But that's to be expected with other's servers because of packet loss and latency) and so, but otherwise fine. On my own locally hosted server it all worked perfect.

However, I tried using Left 4 Dead with HLDJ. I pick a song and press F4 to play it and it goes off. After around a minute, though, it starts getting a little choppy. The choppiness gets worse and worse as it goes, and when it's at its worst, there's a 0.5 second long pause and then the quality is just fine, as if it reset itself. After another minute it starts chopping up again, for some reason (Rinse and repeat). Tapping the play key twice so the song resets makes the quality go back up. I tried using voice_loopback 1 and +voicerecord in console, and that gets good quality. But it also starts getting choppy after two minutes. The latter also goes from good to worst to perfect much faster than HLDJ's voice_inputfromfile does. It also takes around two minutes to start chopping again. All the voice cvars are at default values (Or whatever HLDJ changes them to).

When in the options and testing the voice thingie there that does essentially the same thing, it doesn't get choppy. This really sounds like a L4D error but then I cannot figure out why there's a difference in length between the choppiness and the amount of time required to get choppy depending on whether I am using HLDJ or just a constant loopback of my voice from my own server. .-. This is why I'm asking this here instead of asking Steam Support. That, and their support kinda assumes you are a braindead moron before they get any good reply back to you. ._.

[Renegade]

Sounds like the fadeout problem - this is caused by your setting of voice_fadeouttime (after which time playback begins to gradually fade out). HLDJ will automatically set this to 0 for you (disabling it). However I've heard rumour that Valve intends to remove the cvar altogether. I can't corroborate this as I don't yet own L4D, but you can give it a check in your console: enter "voice_fadeouttime 0" and see if it complains at you. If it doesn't, then double check that the cvar is not being modified elsewhere and that you're on a decent-pinged server.

I'\d assume if they were to get rid of it, they'd at least force-set it to not fadeout at all.. but then again, it's Valve.

edit: just picked it up for the weekend deal. and can confirm that they have in fact removed the cvar.
I don't think much can be done to prevent this; I'll have a look at some of the other voice cvars.

[asaguda]

I don't really think 'fadeout' is choppy like mine was.. Still, thanks for a fast reply, even if it didn't help as much as I wanted it to. I shall be digging around a bit too, just in case.
Anyways, cheers for the fast and well informative post. Oh, and have fun shooting zombies.

[Renegade]

It could also be exasperated by ping issues, but the fadeout cvar is at the root of this problem.
After playing a bit today the odd thing is that it didn't occur on all servers; just the one actually. Try some other servers and let me know if that changes anything.

[Shagrath]

Is there a solution for this problem? I have exactly the same thing.
Songs starts, plays great. After about a minute it gets extremely choppy, then a half sec break and it plays nicely again.

[Renegade]

None that I know of other than to try a different server. It seems to be random across servers and time/ping. Other than that, I suppose if enough people bug Valve about it they may fix it or bring the cvar back.

[Shagrath]

Well I tested it in singleplayer, haven't actually played something long enough on a server.
I guessed that if it does that in singleplayer it will definetly do that online as well, or am I wrong on this?

[asaguda]

Well, not really. I, for one, can't figure out why it wouldn't be the same, but miracles does happen. I played around a bit on servers today. I never got to test properly, I kept getting votekicked. Yay votekick! Next time I shall try without people in the server. Hopefully, I mean.