Background Music cuts out permanently when close to Bards or Emote Instruments

NeoniKa · July 7

I am experiencing a severe and persistent audio issue on PC that I have been unable to resolve, and it has recently gotten significantly worse.

Originally, the problem only occurred around NPC Bards in taverns or towns. However, it has now escalated: whenever I pass by another player using a musical instrument emote, my background music immediately cuts out and shuts down completely. This never used to happen before. And what hurts me the most is that I would actually prefer the opposite, that the bards and emotes of players would be silent so as not to interrupt the game's music.

Note: I also tried to disable all sound effects in an attempt to preserve the soundtrack, but even doing that, the music automatically mutes when I'm close to a bard or a player using an emote.

Has anyone else encountered this specific problem where player emotes or bards completely kill the background music track? Are there any known workarounds, specific audio settings in the UserSettings.txt file, or conflict fixes that can resolve this?

Toanis · July 7

Yes, other players can now change my background music. It's likely a side effect of the ongoing soundscape rework, they asked us to have patience while the work is going on. The question today is whether the folks working on this are still with the team, and even if they are, whether they are still working on this or get reassigned to higher priority tasks.

Urzigurumash · July 7

Not a problem, it should have always been like this by default. Music boxes, bards, and instruments should silence the music by default, but you should be able to change it.

NeoniKa · July 7

Urzigurumash wrote: »

Not a problem, it should have always been like this by default. Music boxes, bards, and instruments should silence the music by default, but you should be able to change it.

For me, it's completely unbearable. This might make sense in a single-player game, but in a game like this, it's indescribably absurd. Now, every minute the music cuts out because someone decides to make noise with some dumb emote, and even if I turn off the sound effects to avoid the noise, I'm still forbidden from listening to the music.

Seriously, I just can't understand the need to keep ruining the game.

NeoniKa · July 7

Toanis wrote: »

Yes, other players can now change my background music. It's likely a side effect of the ongoing soundscape rework, they asked us to have patience while the work is going on. The question today is whether the folks working on this are still with the team, and even if they are, whether they are still working on this or get reassigned to higher priority tasks.

They could have simply put everything back as it was. Everything was fine. In reality, the team that was ruining the game's sound could have left things as they were. The immense amount of sound problems created recently with terrible changes justified a complete restoration of everything to its original state.

NeoniKa · July 7

Is there an addon that can block all musical emotes and bards so we can prevent these annoying things from stopping the soundtrack?

Urzigurumash · July 8

NeoniKa wrote: »

Urzigurumash wrote: »

Not a problem, it should have always been like this by default. Music boxes, bards, and instruments should silence the music by default, but you should be able to change it.

For me, it's completely unbearable. This might make sense in a single-player game, but in a game like this, it's indescribably absurd. Now, every minute the music cuts out because someone decides to make noise with some dumb emote, and even if I turn off the sound effects to avoid the noise, I'm still forbidden from listening to the music.

Seriously, I just can't understand the need to keep ruining the game.

I think the sound redesign has been fantastic. This is just your opinion the old way was better, ruining is quite a stretch. The old way a player had to turn down the Music slider and turn up the Effects sliders to hear Bards and Musicboxes, it was counter intuitive and if you had the Music up loud and Effects low you could pass a Bard and not hear them at all. So the new way is more immersive with Bards and Musicboxes. But yeah a way to turn down other players Emote sounds is probably the best fix for your issue.

katanagirl1 · July 9

Yes, the radius of the bards to trigger this is now huge, you don’t have to be anywhere near them for it to trigger. You can just be riding by on your mount and the game music goes completely away. It used to only happen very near the bards, and take 3-5 seconds for the game music volume to slowly decrease to where you could hear them. There is a bard in the center of the Riften merchants that causes the music volume to go up and down constantly while I am doing crafting writs there every day. I have to go so far as enter the crafting building to get the music to play again or go all the way to the wayshrine.

I have not noticed it with players using emotes but I trust your observations are correct.

EDIT: I also agree it was fine before, if you stopped to listen to bards the game music would slowly fade away and you could hear the bards just fine

NeoniKa · July 11

Urzigurumash wrote: »

NeoniKa wrote: »

Urzigurumash wrote: »

Not a problem, it should have always been like this by default. Music boxes, bards, and instruments should silence the music by default, but you should be able to change it.

For me, it's completely unbearable. This might make sense in a single-player game, but in a game like this, it's indescribably absurd. Now, every minute the music cuts out because someone decides to make noise with some dumb emote, and even if I turn off the sound effects to avoid the noise, I'm still forbidden from listening to the music.

Seriously, I just can't understand the need to keep ruining the game.

I think the sound redesign has been fantastic. This is just your opinion the old way was better, ruining is quite a stretch. The old way a player had to turn down the Music slider and turn up the Effects sliders to hear Bards and Musicboxes, it was counter intuitive and if you had the Music up loud and Effects low you could pass a Bard and not hear them at all. So the new way is more immersive with Bards and Musicboxes. But yeah a way to turn down other players Emote sounds is probably the best fix for your issue.

Well... I think the sound redesign has been utterly hateful. This is just your opinion the new way is better. With the new way a player have to completely mute ALL sound effects just to get rid of the Bards noise and be able to enjoy the soundtrack, before we could just have the sound effects not too loud and keep the soundtrack distracting us from the Brads noise. For example, I had a shortcut key to mute sound effects if the Bard was way too annoying, like the one in Vastyr, and the music didn't lower because of that terrible NPC. It wasn't perfect, but way way better than now.

Anyway... I understand that now that it was damaged at these times, most likely it will never be fixed. So, I just hope someone will create an addon to mute all Bards and player sound emotes. It would be amazing! I've been using Mute Bards Improved, but unfortunately it mutes all sound effects, which means that now we'd be playing with no sound most of the time. It's really sad what they have been doing to game's sound lately.