[PC] How to enable surround sound and environmental audio in Mass Effect

by Fred_vdp
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[PC] How to enable surround sound and environmental audio in Mass Effect

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Mass Effect lacks surround sound on most hardware, and even if your hardware is supported, it requires tweaking a file to implement it. When applying this tweak, you get the following:

 

  • Surround sound
  • Environmental audio (e.g. echoes in the council chamber)

Note that this is only supported on a minority of sound cards. Supported hardware includes some cards in the Creative X-fi and Asus Xonar lineups. It may also work on onboard audio solutions on ASRock and Asus motherboards if you install X-Fi MB, which is premium software.

 

  1. Get into the game and enable hardware audio in the sound settings. Save these changes and exit the game.
  2. Locate BIOEngine.ini and make a backup. By default, this file is stored in Documents - BioWare - Mass Effect - Config. I suggest opening the ini file with Notepad++.
  3. Find the section called [ISACTAudio.ISACTAudioDevice].
  4. Change everything in this section so it looks like this:

MaxChannels=128
TimeBetweenHWUpdates=15.000000
MinOggVorbisDurationGame=20
MinOggVorbisDurationEditor=4
TotalAvailableChannels=128
DeviceName=
UseEffectsProcessing=True
ReserveChannels=2

 

Don't change any settings in-game, because it may override your ini file. If your hardware is supported, you will have 5.1 surround sound, possibly with environmental audio as well.

Creative Alchemy is NOT required.



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