All sound cuts out shortly after starting/loading a game

[Kierran]

I'm having trouble with the sound in Civ 5. Everything runs correctly through the intro movie, game menu, and the first few minutes of playtime. Inevitably though, all sound abruptly stops working. No music, game, ambiance, or interface sounds. The only way to recover is to restart the program, which is obviously a huge nuisance if it happens every few minutes.

I've scoured the forums and Google to no avail and done all the typical actions like updating my drivers. Has anyone encountered anything like this before?

 

[The_J]

Haven't read anything like that here .

But the game would else run on without any problems, yes? Are you able to play music with a music player software in parallel to Civ5?
(I have no real idea, but I guess we could just try to figure some things out, until somebody has an idea)

 

[Kierran]

Yes, the game runs fine after the sound cuts out.

I tried playing Winamp in parallel while playing Civ V. When the sound cut out in Civ V, Winamp died too. I got an error from the Nullsoft DirectSound Output process that said, "Error creating DirectSound buffer. Error code 88780096." After restarting Winamp, it will play music again (though Civ V won't unless I restart it as well).

So something in Civ V is interrupting all sound service on my machine?

 

[The_J]

Well, sounds like that. Normally I'd expect that you would have to restart the whole system after such an interrupt, and not just the program itself .

Whatever. Shortly googled the error message, and this thread here is already on the first google page :/.
There's a hint for something in the system here.
Another person fixed such an error message with a sort of optimizer program (see here), but that seems to do the same .

 

[Kierran]

Just for the sake of science, I ran the game with Windows Media Player in the background. Same deal; when the sound cuts out in game, WMP raises an error stating that something has interrupted the audio service. Interestingly, if I restart WMP without restarting Civ V, then a few minutes later, WMP dies again. So whatever error is causing the Civ V sound to die is independent of whether Civ V is actually playing sound or not.

I'm thoroughly baffled.

 

[timtofly]

Have you tried reloading the sound drivers for windows?