Recently purchased and installed Riven off of GOG.com, and I am unable to get Ambient Sounds to work. I have gone to the Options section of the in-game menu bar and have toggled Ambient Sounds on, but the environments are silent. There still is sound in the game--audio plays perfectly fine during movie sequences, and "important" sounds like manipulating levers are still audible--but "lesser" background effects like the waves crashing on the surf are mute. The Reference Sound buttons in the in-game Setup screens also don't play anything when clicked on.
Running Riven under Win XP Home Edition Service Pack 3. I have integrated sound instead of an actual sound card--a SigmaTel High Definition Audio CODEC, to be precise--but aside from not being able to initiate sound in the FEAR 2 demo, I've never had audio troubles.
Any help would be much appreciated.
EDIT: Upon further investigation, in-game background music also isn't playing. How strange!

Do you play the GOG.com version of Riven, Ralackk? I don't recall seeing any Quicktime installation options at any point. I don't think the GOG Riven is the same as the CD/DVD versions.

I'm sorry, i just re-read your OP and noticed you already had tried toggling the Ambient Sounds
I guess you could try to edit the mohawk.w32 file in a text editor and change the line fEnableAudioProxy=true to fEnableAudioProxy=false and save, as that solves all kinds of problems with Riven. The file in question is in the game folder and you can use wordpad to edit it. You should make a backup of the file before you edit it in case the edited file doesn't solve your problem or create new ones.
BTW, i just remembered, there is indeed anothe puzzle, close to end game, where sound is actually crucial.

Not yet, I will play it in the future but always a case of too many games and not enough time so have no idea when I will get around to it. I'm out of ideas for the moment but will post back if I think of anything else.

Tried it to no avail, sadly. Strangely, I also set the fEnable tags to false underneath both [WaveMix] and [DirectSound], yet I could still hear the usual sound effects. I would think disabling those would just disable the in-game sound entirely, but I guess not.

That's bad news. I'm sorry it's still not working for you.
I haven't come across the problem you're experiencing on other boards yet, but if i find anything relevant to this issue i'll post back here.
You say you can play the .wav files Riveal extracted from the .MHK. How about the .mp2 ones like the ones Riveal extracts to the p_sounds folder ?

Thanks for looking around for me. I really appreciate it, but don't feel bad if you can't come up with anything. This might be just one of those one-in-a-million situations where you get just the wrong hardware are software to mingle together, creating a very unique, unsolvable error.
And strangely enough, I extracted everything that Riveal would allow me to extract, and all it found were hundreds of PNG and MOV files, and a few dozen WAV files; no MP2's whatsoever. Maybe the GOG.com version doesn't use MP2's? It's a pretty obsolete sound format, after all.

Don't worry about it. I'm always lurking some Myst series boards/site anyway, so keeping an eye out for this issue it's really no problem ;)
Yep, there's always a chance this issue is specific to your hardware/software combo. If that's the case you'll probably have to wait for gog's support to take a lok at your DxDiag.
You're right, there aren't any .mp2 files in gog's version .mhk's.
The sounds i extracted from Riven's DVD version are .wav and .mp2, but the sounds from the gog version are all .wav files, so the problem must lie elsewhere.
This is a long shot but since you're on XP, have you tried adjusting the level of Sound HW Acceleration ?

MatthewG, I'm having exactly the same problem. I just purchased the game today, and am running on Vista 32bit.
I have a dedicated soundcard, however, I'm not using integrated sound.
It's kind of disappointing, I was looking forward to settling down for another playthrough of this classic game.

Just gave it a shot, trying the game at every available level of acceleration, but it didn't seem to have any effect. A good suggestion, though. Thank you.
Well, that's good to hear... I mean, it's not good to hear, but if my situation isn't just an isolated incident, there's a higher chance more people will look into it.
So far, getting the sound to work right is proving to be Riven's toughest riddle! :)

Hm. Still no reply from GOG's customer service. I guess they're not sure what to do either.

Yeah, I guess not. Hopefully it gets looked at eventually, though. It's a bit annoying buying a game that doesn't really work how it should.

i am having the same problem as everyone else is I have an onboard Sigmatel HD too, and I just bought Riven and it's not sound in quicktime video's are not working at all. In setup the sound plays fine :(. I dont get this problem on Windows Vista. The Game works fine.

I'm not getting any with a USB headphone set (my normal ones pick it up fine)

Many of Riven's issues are quicktime issues, which is the "glue" to riven on the cd and dvd versions (I have DVD) and I assume the GOG version. If you're having an issue with sound or animation it's probably a quicktime issue. could you tell me what version of quicktime you're using?

Sorry for the late reply.
I ran some sort of program to determine which version of Quicktime I have installed on my computer. Apparently, according to the program, I don't have Quicktime installed at all, which makes me wonder if the GOG.com versions of Myst and Riven even use Quicktime.