Final Fantasy XIV Online has Weird Audio

Hey there Cuties, so I felt obligated to share this little adventure with you all. The other day while doing my tribal quests for the fae, and leveling Sage my audio abruptly cut out, but only in game. Everything else was working. Music, other games, all fine. Just Final Fantasy.

So of course I start looking up fixes. Check it’s not muted in game. Check it’s listed in the Windows audio mixer (it was). Make sure you have your device plugged in, etc etc. Like – ok I get people need the help, but genuinely I could not find a solution to my issue.

One thing to try was fullscreening then windowing the app. What?! How badly optimized is this game that refreshing the render queue like that will literally FIX AUDIO issues? ffs.. I was doomed.

I’d tried uninstalling/reinstalling and spent HOURS on this. I was about to just give up. Last thing I hadn’t actually tried yet was to re-load audio drivers. Fine, I thought, lets make sure to cover all the bases. So I went into the Sound Properties in Windows of the sound device, and do you know what I found?

You know how some sound cards or motherboards have sound effects you can enable like.. echo? Or Bass+ or Headphone Room Emulation, like Hall or Studio, things like that? This graphic is what was present on my sound driver. Just this one checkbox dedicated to disabling all sound effects – of which there were none to actually select. It was checked. I un-checked it and FF started playing audio again.

. . .

So anyway that was my Friday night, how was yours? Love your faces!! -Tan ?