loom audio sync problem

[massguy1980]

even with the newest version of scummvm, it seems that in the begining where your in the tent talking to the others, the audio is not in sync with the game whatsoever. especially when the glass breaks and you see the swans fly. will this problem ever be corrected? ihave the original cd plus the copied versions with the audio in mp3 and ogg format.

[fingolfin]

even with the newest version of scummvm, it seems that in the begining where your in the tent talking to the others, the audio is not in sync with the game whatsoever. especially when the glass breaks and you see the swans fly. will this problem ever be corrected? ihave the original cd plus the copied versions with the audio in mp3 and ogg format.

The speech in the CD version of Loom never was fully synchronized, not even with the original engine, I am afraid. So unless you can point us to a spot that definitely is running in sync with the original engine, but not with ScummVM, it's unlikely this will change, ever.

[glokidd]

also, with the original executeable ive noticed that geat big chunks of speech will be skipped, i mostly noticed it during the first time you are confronted by the sheperds, where several lines can seem to be text only. I daresay that ScummVM handles LOOM CD better than the original engine

[massguy1980]

Ive played the same Loom CD i ihave over the past 10 years. The game is perfectly syncronized. But not perfect with scummvm. Liek i said, in the beginning of the game where u go into the tent and the intro of the elders is not in sync. The audio starts playing a few seconds too late. One easy way to spot it is after the elders are talking and one holds up his distaff and every note that plays is supposed to play the exact time the top of his distaff shines. The distaff shines and audio is heard after. It should be heard the same time. When the glass breaks, of course you dont hear the audio until its already broken seconds later. This game is perfectly synced in dos (real mode). This game will never sound right if you play it thru a dos box in windows either. Something to do with how windows access's the cdrom. There is lag. Theres none in true dos.

[eriktorbjorn]

The audio starts playing a few seconds too late.

While the sync isn't exact, it's nowhere near "a few seconds too late" when I play it in ScummVM. (Using a compressed audio file instead of the CD audio track.) I have no idea why you would see a delay like that.

[fingolfin]

I am surprised there is no FAQ entry for this yet, but...

Usually (well, so far in every single case , when people report sound lagging by a second, it's their sound setup. On Linux systems, they typically are using a sound server like arts, which is causing the lag. On Windows, I think there is some audio setting or so that is screwed up.

But in the end, so far it always turned out to be caused by the system, not by ScummVM.

[massguy1980]

this is scumm's problem not the system. im using windows xp. ive even tried it on win95, win98 and win2000. ive tried loom using scumm on 10 different computers. are you tellng me when the glass breaks you hear it at the same time? because its at least a second off.

[clone2727]

this is scumm's problem not the system. im using windows xp. ive even tried it on win95, win98 and win2000. ive tried loom using scumm on 10 different computers. are you tellng me when the glass breaks you hear it at the same time? because its at least a second off.

I just tried it on my Mac. For some reason, now it is really off. When I first played it on my Mac, it was very close to perfect. But, now it is way off.

[eriktorbjorn]

The audio starts playing a few seconds too late.

its at least a second off.

I'm glad to hear things are improving already.

When I play it, the shattering of the glass is a bit off, but I don't know if it's as much as a second. I think the main problem is that there's absolutely no feedback between sound and animation. For a long scene like that, it just starts the sound and hopes things will still be in sync more than a minute later.

[massguy1980]

this is scumm's problem not the system. im using windows xp. ive even tried it on win95, win98 and win2000. ive tried loom using scumm on 10 different computers. are you tellng me when the glass breaks you hear it at the same time? because its at least a second off.

I just tried it on my Mac. For some reason, now it is really off. When I first played it on my Mac, it was very close to perfect. But, now it is way off.

perhaps im one of the few that notice this because I actually own the original Loom CD and have played it on dos since i was 10 years old. this game is a beautiful work of art. they dont make stuff like this anymore.

[fingolfin]

I own the original Loom CD, too. And hopefully everybody here talking about it owns it, too. We are quite strict when it comes to warez (Forum rule #0...).

Anyway, I also played the original, and I definitely encountered places were audio and video were not fully in sync. Considering how the speech in Loom was done, this is no surprise -- in fact, as eriktorbjorn already stated, there was no such thing as syncing! They just started playing part of the CD track and hoped that it would stay in sync over an extended period of time.

But simple things like an audio driver that doesn't work at precisely 44100Hz, but rather at 44100.01Hz, will cause the audio data to get out of sync after a relatively brief period of time. Given that the hardware parts that generate the clock used for this and other things have a natural variation, this is unavoidable. Hence, the only serious way to encsured audio and video are synchornized is to perform resyncs at regular intervals, maybe once a second or even more often.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to retrofit LoomCD with this. A game has to be written from the ground up with this in mind, and the way LoomCD works makes it impossible to do this.

Hence, if you were very, very lucky, mazbe you happened to own a DOS PC back then which by chance matched the characteristics of the PCs (and the CD driver!) they developed Loom on very closely, thus you got things mostly in sync. But other people, with PCs that were faster/slower, used different audio cards, etc., were not quite as lucky (me, for example).