Music engine eventually crashes

[PiscesToAquaria]

I love this game with every fiber of my being.  Last few days, I've been lucky enough to be able to put in a lot of time into it.  Some play sessions have been at least 8 hours.  Well into 2 of those sessions, the music engine crashed, with the typical endlessly repeating audio buffer as the annoying symptom.  The only way to fix that is to exit altogether and relaunch.  Cant turn the music down either.  It's well and truly frozen.  Everything else continues to work without problems.

I have a Creative Audigy 2 card, and my system is very stable.  I have no such problems with other games, old or new.  This seems like an interrupt problem to me, something asynchronous which goes awry so rarely that it's difficult to catch and debug.

[Alec]

Do you have the latest drivers for your sound card?

[PiscesToAquaria]

No.   

I knew that was going to be your first question.  Creative has horrible drivers, and it took me a while to find some that were stable across the board.  I also use the firewire port on the card for an external HDD, and last time I tried to muck around with the drivers, the whole thing went south.

I don't think you should assume it's the fault of drivers, though.  I don't blame you if you stop listening to me now.  Just don't be surprised if you hear about this problem again from other sources.  Note that audio in general does not crash, only the music engine.  The sound effects and voice continue  to work as before.  If it were a driver issue, all waveform audio would crap out at once, and not just in the game.  I've dealt with that joy before.

[Alec]

Well I'm just using FMod, and they claim that problems can stem from creative sound card drivers.

[PiscesToAquaria]

Heh.  I'm not at all surprised.  Creative has THE worst software support in the industry.  Years go by without updates, and when you get them, they break more things than they fix.  Now that integrated audio is so good on the newer motherboards, I'll never buy another one of their sound cards again.

[Alec]

FMod sometimes adds little work arounds (to get around stupidity in the sound card hardware), so there's a chance this could be fixed in a newer version of FMod. Hard to know where the problem lies exactly.