Toggle sidebar

Speaker popping in RetroArch SNES

  • Thread starter Thread starter lightwo
  • Start date Start date
  • Views Views 688
  • Replies Replies 11
lightwo

lightwo

サーガル
Member
Level 8
Joined
Nov 14, 2024
Messages
500
Solutions
1
Reaction score
779
Trophies
1
Website
lightwo.net
XP
1,419
Country
Croatia
You know when you unlock the Vita for the background music to start playing, and you occasionally get a loud pop? I'm talking about this, but in a specific scenario. I'd imagine this is the system powering on speakers.

In RA, when I load up a SNES core and play e.g. Super Mario World, a game with a lot of brief silence in audio, I get silent popping all the time. I can't imagine this to be very good for the speakers, and it immediately gets annoying.

How can I address this? Is there a more technical term than "popping" or "speakers init"?
 
which version of RetroArch are you using? Doesn't "sound" right. I don't remember any popping sound.

does this happen with other emu's or games or homebrew?
 
Flame said:
which version of RetroArch are you using? Doesn't "sound" right. I don't remember any popping sound.

does this happen with other emu's or games or homebrew?
Click to expand...
RA 1.21.0.

Other than SNES Super Mario World w/ Snes9x 2010, I also tested GBA Super Mario World with gpSP and ran into the same issue.

For clarity, the popping is about as silent as game audio on the lowest volume, and it happens like this:

[Silence] POP! [Audio] [Audio] ... [Silence] POP! [Audio] [Silence] POP! [Audio]

Silence means there's nothing coming from the speakers, not even noise from the DAC.

From my understanding, it would help if the speakers were kept active while a game is playing regardless of whether any audio track has any audio in it.

As for whether other homebrew has this issue, I never noticed it, and in any homebrew ports I just checked, speakers are always active...
 
Last edited by lightwo,
Flame said:
This is a very odd issue. Have you tried Emu4Vita Plus or pSNES? I mean if those have this issue, maybe its hardware issue?
Click to expand...
Well as far as I can tell, this is less of a hardware issue and more of a hardware limitation. The Vita is far from the first device I've had where the way speakers are initialised results in some kind of noise. It is fine if it happens only once, but in this case it happens all the time.

I checked, and apparently I'm far from the only one having a Vita with a speaker that pops when it is enabled. Maybe all units have this quirk?

As for trying other emulators, pSNES behaves exactly the same. Note that I tested with very low volume, with higher volume the game audio might be louder than the pops.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Flame
lightwo said:
Well as far as I can tell, this is less of a hardware issue and more of a hardware limitation. The Vita is far from the first device I've had where the way speakers are initialised results in some kind of noise. It is fine if it happens only once, but in this case it happens all the time.

I checked, and apparently I'm far from the only one having a Vita with a speaker that pops when it is enabled. Maybe all units have this quirk?

As for trying other emulators, pSNES behaves exactly the same. Note that I tested with very low volume, with higher volume the game audio might be louder than the pops.
Click to expand...

I have two vitas' one slim one fat with 3g. I don't remember having such issue. Maybe it does, I never noticed.
 
Flame said:
I have two vitas' one slim one fat with 3g. I don't remember having such issue. Maybe it does, I never noticed.
Click to expand...
If it helps with testing, set the lowest audio volume and start a game. After ambient music stops (if enabled) and before the game plays audio, the speakers will be disabled, so if you hear a pop when DAC noise kicks in, that confirms it.

Either way, the solution to this problem would be to somehow keep speakers active. Playing a silent dummy audio file with Music leaves a lot to be desired and requires modifying/building the media library... but it does technically work.
Post automatically merged:

Never mind, it looks like even the silent dummy file workaround doesn't work... almost as if there's a dB cutoff under which the speakers become inactive. Furthermore, repeating any track/file results in silence after the end was reached, so there's another pop. Ugh...
 
Last edited by lightwo,
I have a vita slim and have the same popping issue as you, I think it's a hardware issue, I use the silent music file trick works for vita games and the home menu any way, I notice that psp games doesn't have the popping sound so the speakers must be always enabled while playing psp games.
 
  • Like
Reactions: lightwo
Serph-DDS said:
I have a vita slim and have the same popping issue as you, I think it's a hardware issue, I use the silent music file trick works for vita games and the home menu any way, I notice that psp games doesn't have the popping sound so the speakers must be always enabled while playing psp games.
Click to expand...
Did you use any particular method? While it is still a workaround I don't like... in Audacity, I generated 5 seconds of noise with 0.01 amplitude, exported as MP3 (mono 128 kbps), and imported that on Vita using Media Importer. In Music, I enabled repeat for the single track.

Result: Popping every few seconds, as there's a small delay between track end and start.
 
Why not just download a 30 min or 1 hour silent music file and use that so it will pop only every hour which would be less annoying. That's what I done.
 
  • Like
Reactions: lightwo
Serph-DDS said:
Why not just download a 30 min or 1 hour silent music file and use that so it will pop only every hour which would be less annoying. That's what I done.
Click to expand...
Well sure, that was obvious. I'm not a fan of making a nasty hack even nastier, but that will have to do for now! :rofl2:
 
It's not ideal but could be worse and it seems to solve the issue completely for me anyway, but I don't use many emulators so not sure if it works there.
 
  • Like
Reactions: lightwo

Site & Scene News

Go to forum More news

Popular threads in this forum

Homebrew Tutorial Project  RetroFlow - Homebrew games box art collection

Vita TV Technical Issue

Repaired aliexpress 1000 3G motherboard, but the shop couldn't figure out how to fix headphone jack

Error code C1-2613-2

Tutorial  How to add friends on Vita Despite the error

disable the green light on PSvita 2000?

PSX games without Adrenaline?

C2-12828-1 Saved Core File Succeeded