Sharing my fix for music stuttering

[Dent0n]

Like many people I ran into the music stuttering problem when playing on a modern PC running Windows 10. I'll share my fix step by step:

 

Initial fix: AC3config

 

• Download and install AC3config
• Install regfile that comes with it
• Run app, under "System" tab select "wave out" in Default Audio Renderer

Fixed! But music is now inseperable from the rest of the game audio and cannot be independently volume adjusted, overpowering speech and other effects.

 

My Workaround:

 

• Download and install Audacity
• Backup Oblivion music files
• Set MP3 export to 128kbps constant bitrate, normalization to -30db
• Create macro to normalize and export to MP3
• Apply to Oblivion music files (I did it folder-by-folder, it may be possible to do them all at once)
• Audacity creates a subfolder containing normalized files, replace originals with these

Fixed! Nice normal-volume music and voice/footsteps/weapon sounds aren't overpowered anymore.

 

Caveats: Normalization using this method may reduce audio quality (I noticed no problem with my cheap Ausdoms). it is possible to do this losslessly, but it requires the use of tags which I heard Oblivion hates. If there is a way to get Oblivion to work with tagged sound files I guess that'd be perfect.

 

Bonus: Use with Silent Wind mod (tested with All Natural and working fine so far)

 

if this helps anyone I'd be glad to hear about it.