Mass Effect Legendary Edition – Surround Sound FIX

Mass Effect Legendary Edition Surround Sound FIX

FIX Surround Sound Not Working

Welcome to our Mass Effect Legendary Edition Surround Sound FIX guide! ! We have prepared all details for you. We will update it again, follow us! Because Bioware again shipped some broken, old OpenAL32.dll where surround is not working properly here are steps to fix it.

Steps

  1. Download openal soft from https://openal-soft.org
  2. Put file from Win32/soft_oal.dll as OpenAL32.dll to Windows/SysWOW64 and file from Win64/soft_oal.dll as OpenAL32.dll to Windows/system32, override if necessary
  3. Delete OpenAL32.dll from binaries in game directory
  4. Put this:

[ISACTAudio.ISACTAudioDevice]
MaxChannels=128
UseEffectsProcessing=True
TimeBetweenHWUpdates=15
MinOggVorbisDurationGame=20
MinOggVorbisDurationEditor=4
DeviceName=
ReserveChannels=2
TotalAvailableChannels=128
UseEffectsProcessing=True

To BIOEngine.ini in config directory in path like Mass Effect Legendary Edition\Game\ME1\BioGame\Config, make it read-only so game doesn’t override it. There should be already section like ISACTAudio.ISACTAudioDevice so put it there.

  1. Run alsoft-config.exe from openal-soft-{version}-bin\alsoft-config and set your desired channels – in my case it’s 7.1 and click apply, you can try other options, whatever seem to be better for you
  2. (Optionally) go to %appdata%, there should be file alsoft.ini and you can try adding two options there:

volume-adjust = 6
front-stablizer=true

volume-adjust increases overall sound volume -24 to 24
front-stablizer – mixes sound from left and right channel to center

  1. Just run a game, you should have surround sound working fine now
  2. If it doesn’t work try restarting your PC
  3. Also it might work if you replace dll only in a binaries folder – but i didn’t try it

    2 thoughts on “Mass Effect Legendary Edition – Surround Sound FIX”

    1. Hi, is this fix for the PC only (so onboard and add on sound cards for example) or does this fix apply to AV receivers everyone has been having problems with which bypasses pc audio by piping it to the AVR via HDMI?

      To compare and troubleshoot, I tested the game on my pc 5.1 speakers hooked into a Creative x-fi and I get full surround and environmental effects like the cramped tin can echo of Joker’s cockpit. I get only 2.1 audio from the AVR but it is a 5.1.2 Atmos setup. Changing the audio processing on the AVR does nothing to change anything.

    2. Just to let you if you take file from Win64/soft_oal.dll and rename it to OpenAL32.dll and put in the Binaries folder it will work too.
      (However I did have a normal soft al installation first and configured it to 7.1 So I am not sure if you have place the files in the windows folder before configuring. Afterwards it will be sufficent to have the renamed files in the Mass Effect 1 Binaries folder.)

      Thanks for the great guide. Really enjoying it in 7.1

    Leave a Comment

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *