Why does Sunshine always change the system audio format to 24 bit, 48000 Hz?

[TCAtrevor]

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I use the Steam Streaming Speakers as my audio sink for Sunshine, and lately Sunshine has been changing the audio format of the device to 24 bit, 48000 Hz every time streaming starts. This has been causing ear piercingly loud, staticy audio out of my system that I have to go into the audio control panel and set back every time. If this was a change made in Sunshine's code, please revert it because it is wildly annoying. Otherwise, it would be really nice to have a solution implemented. Seems like #276 could be a potential one.

[ReenigneArcher]

Probably started after LizardByte/Sunshine#3294

@andygrundman any thoughts on this?

[andygrundman]

Can you describe your setup a bit more? Do you have existing audio playing in another format and then Sunshine changes it while it's still playing? What is the previous format? What is your default audio device? Is it a motherboard audio device? If so, do you have any running audio tools from e.g. Realtek?

If you're streaming in stereo, one workaround is to not check the box "Mute host PC speakers while streaming" in Moonlight. This will cause Sunshine to not make any changes.

I agree that a way to set the bit depth/samplerate might help, unfortunately I have never had this problem and don't know how to reproduce it.

[TCAtrevor]

My setup is a bit wild but I will try to explain.

My primary use of Sunshine is akin to the use of Parsec; I share my screen with friends to play games together. For this use case, having everyone disable the option to mute host speakers could work, but I am often on a Discord call with them on the same computer and that would feed their own voices back to them through the stream.

The Steam Streaming Speaker provides a solution to this: I can send all system audio there except for Discord, which can output directly to my headphones, and then I can enable "Listen to this device" on the corresponding AUX input to send all of my desktop audio to the headphones as well.

In the end, I get to hear all of my desktop audio, albeit with a slight latency, and my friends get to as well without themselves echoed... until one day somebody connected and blaringly loud static was sent to my headphones instead, ouch.

[andygrundman]

Yikes, that's a pretty gross setup and Sunshine is probably not the source of your problems. You should check out Voiceemeeter, it's a better way to route audio when trying to solve this kind of DIscord audio-to-friends issue. Does Parsec work? It's designed for your use whereas Sunshine would strongly discourage what you're doing.

[TCAtrevor]

I don't want to use Parsec because I prefer being able to self-host. There don't seem to be many other solutions besides Sunshine. I could try VoiceMeeter, it does seem to be a technically better option for my use case. Even in that case, I don't think Sunshine should be trying to change the audio format of any device. An option to change whether it does this or not would be best I think.

[andygrundman]

Does the problem go away if you set your main audio device to 24-bit so that it matches the Steam speakers instead of doing it the other way around? I'm wondering if the "Listen to this device" feature doesn't do any resampling when trying to mix 2 sources using different settings. You mentioned it also adds latency, this is really the best reason you should try Voicemeeter, I'm pretty sure it doesn't add any latency. This guide they have might be one of the most intimidating things I've ever seen though, but it's free so it's worth a try. There's also a ton of guides on Youtube. https://voicemeeter.com/setup-voicemeeter-for-skype-zoom-or-discord/

I do think we should add a simple option for limiting Steam speakers to 16-bit. It will always use 48khz because that is the samplerate used by Opus.

[TCAtrevor]

Setting my main device to 24-bit does not prevent the static unfortunately. (I hadn't actually tried that before now, I'm a bit surprised this doesn't work.)

I have another suggestion now, too. I hope this isn't too off-topic from this discussion: It would be very nice to have an option in Sunshine's settings to override the Moonlight client setting to "Mute host PC speakers". Seems like a pretty simple idea to me, a dropdown with the options "Always mute speakers", "Never mute speakers", and "Use client preference (default)". It always confused me a bit that this was a client option and not a host option.

Thank you for your replies!

[andygrundman]

I've submitted a PR that will keep the Steam device at 16-bit when the default audio device is using 16-bit. LizardByte/Sunshine#3704

[TCAtrevor]

Thank you!!