Voice and Music do not Play in Fallout 4 or Skyrim through Steam

Hello.

I have an issue where when I play certain games on Steam (fallout 4 and skyrim), the sound effects work, but the music and voice dialog do not work.

I'm running Garuda with an AMD Athon 3000g with 16gb of ram.

I posted on the steam website about this issue, and here's what they suggested:

Validate files for Fallout (some Steam specific function where it checks/compares the files with the latest files from Steam).

Change proton version (was currently running 6.38, went back one rev and also when to proton experimental.. no change).

Check and make sure you are not configured for surround sound. This made perfect sense to me.. If it was set for surround sound and I was using stereo speakers, you would not hear all the channels. Checking in the Garuda sound options in system settings however, it is set to digital stereo. Surround sound options are unavailable.

Make sure you have 16 bit 48000khz sound set up. I am not sure how to do this, but I saw from an audio device status console command that it was set to 32 bit 48000khz. I don't know how to change the bitrate in Garuda. If someone knows how to do this, I would be grateful if they could tell me how.

Uninstall then reinstall - As much as I DIDN'T want to do this (32 gb download), I did it and it made no difference. Besides, this is happening on both Fallout 4 and Skyrim (both use the same engine from what I understand). I have Fallout 3 and NV, but I can hear voices just fine in these games (all downloaded through Steam).

I'm curious to see if these games have the same problem if downloaded OUTSIDE of steam (not sure if GOG or humble bundle have these games or not)..

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this?

I appreciate any help you can provide.

Install the new proton-ge-custom-bin-7.0rc3_GE_1-1 and use that if a system update doesn't grab it for you already. People reporting at https://www.protondb.com/app/377160 say newer versions of proton-GE help with the sound problems.

Hi, Kayo. Appreciate the help! I may wind up installing this proton update anyhow, but I just found a launch setting that fixes the problem here: Fallout 4 - Lutris

I just put this line in the launch parameters of both Fallout 4 and Skyrim:

WINEDLLOVERRIDES="xaudio2_7=n,b" PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=90 %command%

Something to do with a 90ms sound latency delay? Maybe that proton update makes it where you don't need to put this in?

Anyway, I really appreciate the help. I hope someone else sees this if they have a similar problem.

1 Like