Ok so all audio just keeps looping on the first second or so. It's truly unplayable when even just starting the CG sequence just keeps saying "Drack is back" repeatedly, so with that skipped, on the outskirts of town I get "To speak to a char..." repeated non stop... this is maddening... I thought this would be money well spent, but I am quickly learning the contrary to this.

So any help here would be appreciated.

What version of windows do you have installed? Also, do you have DirectX 9.0C installed? My game works, with a few audio hickups, but overall i am satisifed. Also, what are you're system specs? I'm using Windows 7 64 bit.

My game has a few audio hickups as well. =p

Same issue here. At first I thought the repetition was a feature (by the end of the intro I was starting to zen with the chanting) then the regular speech looped and the penny dropped for me :))

FWIW I'm running Win7 64-bit, DX 11c with a Realtek audio chip on the motherboard. I've tried it in WinXP SP3 compatibility mode and running as admin, but nothing fixes the vocals.

Turning them off in the options, however, works just fine and I can live with the subtitles which appear in lieu. Yes its a workaround, but I can play without going mad now.

Laptop
Vista home 32bit
Intel Celeron 900 @2.20GHz
3GB RAM
DirectX 11
Realtek onboard sound

I've tried compatability modes, but every one I try gives me a message to insert the game CD...

delete

Same here. Win7 64-bit with Creative X-Fi, recent drivers. All sounds are looped, even the sound sample in audio settings.

Try disabling the audio hardware acceleration, there should be an option in the dxdiag tool and/or in the control center somewhere (can't remember).
This should normally fix almost all audio problems with older games.

Be aware though that this feature was removed in newer versions of Windows, so I can't tell you if this works with Darkstone since I use Win7.

Everybody else might give this a try: open control center, go to hardware and sound, open the audio device manager, select your output device, open properties, go to advanced and uncheck the two boxes there. This does nothing for me BUT it is worth a shot at least.

Here's a weird part. I tried it again after three months and it works perfectly now! The same system, the same drivers. There were a few Windows updates since the last time I tried the game and I did install some software but I cannot see anything obvious. Most of the Win updates were security related -- in theory it is possible that one of them affected this particular issue but not very likely.

I had the same issue. I've tried fixing a lot of things, hardware acceleration, fiddled with some settings I shouldn't even be fiddling with, reinstalling without the patches, checking out each individual patch - nothing worked. But after reading this: I became suspicious. So I decided to do the 1 thing I haven't tried. I restarted my computer.

And it fixed it.

I tried reinstalling it just to re-check - got the same looping sound bug. After restarting my comptuer, it was fixed again.

Don't know if this'll work for everyone, but it worked for me for 3 installations on 2 different comptuers (two on Windows XP and one Windows 7).

So, my suggestion is - restart your computer if you're getting this error. It might be just the thing to help you ^^

Interesting and bizarre. The weird part -- it is not the only game that has this kind of a problem. I've recently played Grey Matter. The sound was completely broken after the installation -- looked online and a few people suggested to restart the computer. It actually worked! It does not make much sense on Win7... Whenever I get a bit of time I will try to investigate further.

FYI, in Windows restarting the computer should be one of the first things to try. Particularly with sound and/or video related issues.

Ten+ years ago I would agree but these days with a properly configured system it is rarely required. I measure uptime in weeks if not months and generally restart only after system patches. What sometimes happens is that some installers intentionally put some "RunOnce" entries in the registry thus requiring a reboot for no good reason. Happens mostly to older installers. However, I would expect to game not to run at all until the reboot in this case. I might investigate further if I have time.

Yeah, no. Nothing to do with a properly configured system. You could likely skip the restart if the audio/video drivers could be reinitialized back to their initial state. RunOnce entries don't enter into it for this case. Further investigation is often useful.

RunOnce may be used to complete the install of the game or some runtime. A similar case if when an installer wants to update something that is in use - that also requires a restart. Other than that, the audio/video drivers are supposed to reinit and most of them do. I have to agree that audio drivers are not always completely clean in that respect, some corner cutting is not unheard of (I had more than enough problems with product from certain well known company with name starting with C). Still something odd - stuck driver state should've affected multiple things, not just one game that was just installed.