This isn’t a bug, but a mastering mistake in soundtrack. In most music tracks there are times when volume levels jumps up and down, making it sound like kid is messing with your amp. This distortion is noticeable during gameplay.
I extracted audio files to ensure the issue is with the way music is recorded and can confirm it’s there (this means everyone is experiencing this, but perhaps not everyone cares enough about audio to notice). I’ve checked original game’s music on YouTube (and remastered too) and these are fine. Whoever did a remastering job on a soundtrack that was put in the game did a lousy job. Audio tracks need to be completely replaced.
FREQUENCY OF ISSUE
100% of the time / matches I play (ALWAYS)
REPRODUCTION STEPS
Here’s the steps to reproduce the issue:
Listen to the soundtrack in skirmish.
Or extract audio and listen to it that way.
For example, it happens at the very beginning of the track Get Ye Sum.
EXPECTED RESULT
Music should sound as it’s supposed to. As far as I could tell the issue isn’t present on the soundtrack sold separately on Steam. I don’t own it and only listened to it on Youtube.
Everybody has this problem, unless somehow you have different audio files in the game. It’s probably not very audible unless you’re using good headphones.
This is one of the first things that I noticed after launch when I first played the DE months ago. I initially thought it was due to lag, but it’s always the same parts of the music, and if you know what it should sound like, it’s very noticeable.
It was even remastered for this DE, so it’d be even more unfortunate if this never gets looked in to since that more than cancels out the improvements from the remastering.
If it’s as easy a fix as you suggest (only swapping the audio files with the ones sold on the soundtrack, and making sure no other weird compression is going on in the release process), then I hope this will get fixed soon. It’s a huge shame the way it sounds right now. I especially notice it during Get Ye Sum, too.
i even have this same issue during normal gameplay with music off, especially with high amount of canons in action, the sound drops and comes back and drops again… so annoying
To help make sure that we are all talking about the same issue and make the word descriptions less ambiguous, I have made a brief audio comparison:
→ I took two short audio snippets from a music track and I repeated each snippet 4 times
→ twice the good soundtrack version, and then twice the broken in-game version.
Then the same for the second snippet. This way, the difference may be easier to understand.
(ignore the horse sound in the end, I recorded all game audio for this)
These snippets are from Get Ye Sum, the full “in-game” version of which was already linked earlier in this thread as well.