HELP! Suddenly .mod files will not play properly on my arcade tower

[Seith]

I am running some PC games on my arcade tower and the other day, seemingly out of the blue, the music in a couple of the games was all... different 

The best example I can give you is the game Shotgun Ninja.

Here's a youtube video of it being played with the music in the background how it is supposed to sound:



And this is how it sounds on my PC:



The weirdest thing about this is that I made an intro video for this game for my frontend that used to play the soundtrack the way it was meant to sound, and now even that video is missing the low-end audio channel at the beginning of the tune.  I start playing and there's literally no music until about 15 seconds in, where some sparse sounds from the soundtrack... kind of "leak" through the speakers.

TL:DR - Game used to play with a full-sounding soundtrack, now only plays a fraction of the sounds it used to.

[Drnick]

Odd,  Is it only .mod files that it is doing it to.  or is it all sounds?  If it is all sounds then have you tried another set of speakers/headphones just in case there is something truly funky with your speakers/connection.  Failing that it could be the AC3 codec has become corrupted/modified in some way. Try reinstalling the AC3 codec.

[Seith]

The only two games it seems to have affected that I have installed are games that play tracked music like .mod and .s3m etc. etc.

Shotgun Ninja and Seiklus.  And in both cases, the gameplay video that I made myself from a year ago that sounded fine up until now is also missing sounds.

FWIW, I tried Shotgun Ninja on my other computer which is a Windows 7 machine and the music is the same i.e. missing sounds from the soundtrack.

[Drnick]

What format is the video file in?  If you use GSpot or something similar you can check what audio codec it is using and try reinstalling that codec, or checking if it has any options you can change.  Chances are the video file also uses the ac3 codec,  although what would cause it to only play certain sounds ? Maybe a 5.1 track only outputting to 4.1 so centre channel is missing or something like that is the only thing I can think of.   I am fairly sure that the problem will be codec related though.

[Seith]

What format is the video file in?  If you use GSpot or something similar you can check what audio codec it is using and try reinstalling that codec, or checking if it has any options you can change.  Chances are the video file also uses the ac3 codec,  although what would cause it to only play certain sounds ? Maybe a 5.1 track only outputting to 4.1 so centre channel is missing or something like that is the only thing I can think of.   I am fairly sure that the problem will be codec related though.

Codecs... alright, i'll be the first to say that codecs aren't my strong point.  I'll try to detail this as best as I remember from when I started building up the software on this machine.

I installed:

Nimo codec pack
XviD codec
ffdshow codec pack

Is there a recommended codec pack out there that is all-encompassing?

[Drnick]

ffdshow should be good enough. Personally I installed the K-Lite Codec pack (Playback only version). I would uninstall the packs and either just install ffdshow or go for the k-lite pack.  Also try playing the movie in VLC see if it does the same thing in there.