All Sound Cuts Out With a Pop

Hello, I’m working on a social VR experience and am having problems with all sound in Unity cutting out.

I’m using Photon Voice for VOIP, Steam Audio for spacialization and a custom audio engine to manage most sounds.

Occasionally when there are about 8 players on the server using VOIP everyone will simultaneously hear a short “pop” sound and then all sound will cut out. Not just the VOIP but all sounds in the game. Sound will come back a few minutes later.

There is nothing reported in the logs. If a player quits the game and re-joins they will hear sounds and everyone’s VOIP. If a player is playing in the Unity editor they will not be effected. I got a fuzzy report from one player that “something weird happened with the volume slider” while their sound was out.

I have some circumstantial evidence that it’s not voice starvation. When voice starvation occurs my music system detects that it isn’t playing and regularly tries to restore itself. That doesn’t happen when the bug occurs.

Googling, it seems that only one other person has ever experienced this problem, the game RimWorld ([15.280] Loud, bassy "pop" followed by sound cutting out). I contacted them and they have no solution to the problem. Reproduction is a challenge for both of us.

I’ve been in contact with Photon but they haven’t seen this before and don’t know what might be causing it.

How should I be debugging this? Reproduction is a challenge because I have to get ten people playing for at least an hour to have a chance of seeing the bug. This bug is killing my project and I don’t know how to tackle it.

I have resolved this myself. I was passing in bad data to the spacializer in very rare circumstances. If this happens to you go looking for a NaN, Infinity etc… in your sound data.

Colin,

Did you find a solution?

I am using Steam Audio with multiple audio sources ( I have Photon Voice included in my project but it is not in use ) and I have the same issue.

Thank you,

David

Finally stumbled upon this post while searching for anyone with similar issues to mine - and just have to give a quick appreciation shout-out. Your answer lead me in the right direction very fast.

Seems to not only be an issue in Photon Voice, but also in Dissonance Voice (easy to fix tho)

Thanks again!

So what is the solution? Im also experiencing this with Dissonance while playing a live video stream and people chatting…