audio issues

[amatsagu]

It'll sound like a dumb, hard to reproduce problem.. I've downloaded latest binary version of launcher from github releases, had few attempts at downloading game (sometimes it got stuck for no obvious reason), eventually it went through and game launched.

Everything seemed fine but after like 30-40min of playing, I noticed weird, like glitching sounds. When characters speak - my bluetooth headphones catch glitching sounds at beginning of any new sound that plays. I've tried disabling headphones & plugging my regular speakers - same issue. Another thing I found while later - both Spotify and Deezer music gets same laggy/glitching audio as long as HSR is running. It instantly goes away when I kill game process.

Debian 13 (Trixie, testing branch)
Linux kernel v6.10.9
Honkers launcher v1.8.2
Pipewire v1.2.3-1
Sway (tiling manager) v1.9-2

I'm not 100% sure if there's something maybe missing, I've installed audio support by doing:

apt install pipewire pipewire-audio-client-libraries pamixer
systemctl --user --now enable pipewire pipewire-pulse
systemctl --user daemon-reload 

Until now, it always worked for me just fine - had no issues with music players, web browser or some other games.

When playing HSR on Linux, my laptop with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U consistently has iGPU at 97-99% usage but CPU is chilling on 20-35% usage. I also play while plugged and use gamescope (v3.12.5-1) so my 8/16 core CPU and iGPU should work just fine. I have 8GB allocated to integrated graphics and another 24GB as system memory so I don't think there's problem with not enough resources.

I use xwayland (v2:24.1.2-1) only for games, all other applications runs in wayland "natively".

[amatsagu]

I'll attach any logs if you tell me what you need.. My guess is - there's something wrong with wine/proton communicating to pipewire service. When it happens, all audio seems to be glitched, no matter what application emits it but as soon as I kill HSR/xwayland process, it all goes back to normal.

[ginryuoku]

I get it pretty consistently on my Ryzen+iGPU laptop and my main rig (which also has a Ryzen processor but uses a Radeon dGPU), but I'm not sure if it's the same bug. If it is, what fixed it for me (partially; you can still hear it if you listen closely on the title screen) was lowering the master volume, lowering all volumes even lower, and putting SFX below Music/Voice. I used 3 for main and I think 6/6/4 for Music/Voice/SFX and it seems to minimize it. I believe it's the same problem that plagues some Android players. It doesn't seem to be GPU load, quantum issues, pulseaudio latency or sample rate, though sample rate might be worth checking since this title defaults to 44100 and pipewire/wireplumber defaults to coercing everything to 48000.

[amatsagu]

I tried playing with sample rate but that totally destroyed my audio on entire system... surprisingly - purging pipewire and having clean installation fixed it. Then we had update and it broke again in HSR. I found somewhere else (outside this repository) that it has something to do with wine/proton not being fast enough with producing/passing audio and pipewire doesn't really wait and starts playing that noise/corrupted audio.

Extending max latency in pipewire did help but it's still unstable? Right now, when I login into game - I notice huge drop in audio quality (muffled and mono) around the time when you're waiting to be logged (train close camera appears), then it goes back to normal and I can start playing. At first it seems to work fine but after 30+ minutes of gameplay, any sudden audio change creates that cracking noise. It doesn't happen with game music but I can hear it when characters use ultimate or when you talk with NPC and they speak their dialogue. My guess is that some buffer eventually overflows? Increasing max time pipewire can wait seems to help but you cannot set it too high, otherwise latency will feel like on cheap bluetooth earphones.

Edit: I mentioned that issue seems to be with wine/proton (that's what other people said when I looked for solution) but I play more games using proton and HSR is only game with this issue.