Soundcard issues

Information about sound card issues related to EVE

For best sound quality the soundcards need to be DirectX compatible and have at least 12 free hardware channels. Most Soundblaster cards and similar cards support this. Make sure you are using the latest drivers available. Here's a short list of the most common soundcard makers.

• Soundblaster
• Realtek
• Cmedia
• SoundMax

If you think your soundcard is causing problems (symptoms include problems logging into the game and crashes to desktop), you need to ensure that you have all the relevant windows updates and your soundcard drivers are up to date.

If you hear distortions while playing you can lower sound acceleration, although it isn't the best solution: Go to control panel, sounds and multimedia (or sounds and audio Devices in XP). On the Audio tab click the Advanced button in the Sound Playback section. Select the Performance tab and set the Hardware acceleration slider to None.

As a last resort, to determine that it is indeed your soundcard that is crashing the game, try disabling the sound by going to your cache folder. The cache and settings folder are kept in the following locations :

• "%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\CCP\EVE\" on Windows XP.
• "%LOCALAPPDATA%\CCP\EVE\" on Windows Vista.

Simply copy and paste the paths into the explorers address bar or into the field you get by Start-Run or Windows-Key + R (without the " ) Open the prefs.ini file and change audio=1 to audio=0, this will disable all ingame sound and music. You can also do this ingame by pressing ESC and untick the Audio Enabled option under the Audio tab.