F22 Air Dominance Fighter part 4: Sounding better
- DarkenedRoom
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
A guide to fixing the sound issues affecting MIDI music, sound fx and speech. In part 3 of this series we had F22 Air Dominance Fighter (F22 ADF) running well under Win10, however MIDI music could not be used simultaneously with sound fx and speech.
It's time to correct that.
What was going wrong
When F22 ADF was running with MIDI music disabled or with the volume turned down to 0, we could hear the sound fx and speech, both in the menu pages and when in a mission.
As soon as the MIDI music was enabled and the volume increased we would hear MIDI music but nothing else.
It turns out this was due to the F22 ADF app being muted in Win10 during startup and when starting a mission. This was observable in the sndvol control panel in Win10.
Why this happens isn't clear, it may be due to the interaction of F22 ADF and/or Win10 sound components, as this happened prior to VirtualMIDISynth or MIDIMapper being added into the compatibility mix.
What needs to be done
It would be preferable if this didn't happen, but given we can't rewrite F22 ADF, what we need is a workaround. So when the F22 ADF app is muted, we can unmute it.
This is slightly more tricky than it sounds, as F22 ADF is running in a full screen Glide emulation mode provided by nGlide and switching back to the desktop and back to the game, is problematic and crash prone.
This means using the existing Win10 sound controls isn't going to work (or at least work well or reliably).
How to do it
So we need a utility we can use from within F22 ADF without switching to the desktop, which suggests the use of a hotkey combination, which will allow us to unmute F22 ADF and restore sound fx and speech.
AutoHotKey (AHK) was considered but this became a very complicated programming exercise. The example scripts that initially looked promising, didn't quite manage to work or restore fx or speech. I believe it doesn't help, when nGlide takes control and switches to full screen, focus may initially be lost (a mouse click restores it).
It's probably theoretically possible to use AHK to solve this problem, but quite the challenge.
EarTrumpet
An alternative is EarTrumpet an app available on the Windows Store, which is effectively a drop-in but enhanced replacement for the sndvol control panel. It offers a wide range of sound controls and more precise control over apps and the devices they play through.
And critically, it provides a customised action framework, to control sound through simple actions, including muting or unmuting apps with hotkey combinations. This sound promising.
Installing
There are two releases a standard and experimental dev release. The experimental dev release is one required, as the action framework is not available in the standard release (at time of writing). Both are available at EarTrumpet.
Given that the app is distributed as a Windows installer package, installation is straightforward.
Once installed, go to Settings > Apps and configure EarTrumpet. My settings are shown below as an example. You may have to restart your machine once installed.
The interface is very clean and simple, (shown below). If you have the Actions option the correct release was installed.
Now all we need to do now is to create an action to unmute F22 ADF!
Creating an action
Creating an action is a very simple process and it takes about 2 mins. The action I created has been exported and is available below. This can be imported into your copy of EarTrumpet.
It uses the hotkey combo of <ctrl> + F2 to unmute F22 ADF. You should feel free to change this if you would prefer a different hotkey combo.
In fact it's so easy, that importing the above action might be more work than just recreating it, so I've included a screenshot of the action below:
And that concludes the workaround for F22 ADF muting sound fx and speech when MIDI music is enabled and audible!
VirtualMIDISynth
The only minor change to be aware of is that VirtualMIDISynth must now be run as an administrator to make changes to the soundfonts.
Example video
Finally...
Huge credit and thanks to the EarTrumpet devs for this utility. It's probably being used in a way that was never intended, but it works well!
Good hunting!