Need Your Help with a sound problem...

[MIKE JG]

A strange thing is happening these days inside my FS9 world.  Everytime I load a new aircraft whether it's on initial startup or anytime FS9 is running, the aircraft, regardless of what it is, has the sound from the previously loaded aircraft.  For example if I boot up FS9 and load up a F-16 it may have the sound of a Piper Cub or whatever aircraft I was flying the previous time I was running FS9.  This affects all my aircraft including helicopters.  So if I load up a huey and the aircraft I was flying previous to that was a Cessna 172, the huey has the sounds from the 172 instead of its own sound file.

Anyone know what's going on with this??  This seems to have all started after I installed an AI traffic watch utility called Traffic Viewboard.  

[Graycat]

Heya Mike,

This sound issue has been around since FS 2004 came out and has nothing to do with Traffic Viewboard.

What happens is this.  If you select an aircraft that has a sound aliased to another aircraft sometimes FS 2004 becomes confused and will select a previous aircraft sound instead.  Example: Let's say that you initially load a Learjet at the start of the game and go flying.  You land and decide to fly a 3rd party Add-On Cessna.  Without stopping the game you switch aircraft to the 3rd party Cessna.  When you start the engine, you still hear a Learjet sound.

To my knowledge there are two ways to resolve this issue.  

The first method is to close and re-open FS 2004 and select the 3rd party airplane as your initial aircraft.

The second (and better - IMHO) method you should only try if you have acres and acres of hard disk space like I do.

When you download and install a 3rd party aircraft always install it to a temporary folder in your FS 2004 Aircraft folder first.  Go into that aircraft's temporary folder and open the Sound Folder.  If it has a Sound.cfg and a bunch of separate *.wav files then you're OK.  Go ahead and finish installing the aircraft.

If the Sound folder only has a Sound.cfg file then open that file using MS notepad.

If the Sound.cfg looks like this when you open it with MS notepad:

[fltsim]
alias=B737_400\sound

Then you're probably going to have trouble.

In this case you should simply go into the default FS 2004 Boeing 737-400 folder (as aliased in the example Sound.cfg file above) and copy the Sound folder.  Then open the temporary folder of the 3rd party aircraft and Paste the copied Sound folder there.  When you get the message on your screen saying "this folder already contains a sound folder do you want to over-write?" then click "Yes to All".  That's it.  It's fixed.

Two things to remember:

1.)  This only works with individual planes.  If you have 12 different aircraft with 12 Sound.cfg files that say "alias=xyz" then you need to copy/paste a soundset for each of the 12 aircraft.

2.)   When I said that you need loads of hard disk space earlier the reason is that if you have 12 different aircraft that you are copying and pasting original Sound folders into this is going to eat up some disk space.

Be prepared!

[MIKE JG]

I'll give that a try as yes I do have many 3rd party aircraft with aliased sound files.

Thanks for the advice...

[Graycat]

No problem, Mike.  I'm always happy to help out.