Mass Effect™ Legendary Edition: How to Fix Mass Effect 1 Surround Sound

Mass Effect™ Legendary Edition has come out via Steam now. here is a simple tutorial on how to fix Mass Effect 1 Surround Sound. as Bioware again shipped some broken, old OpenAL32.dll where surround is not working properly.

 

Method 1 (Recommended):

The first method is simple and easy. Just rename Win64\soft_oal.dll to OpenAL32.dll and drop it in Mass Effect Legendary Edition\Game\ME1\Binaries\Win64

Now Your rear and center speakers work.

Credit to NStriker

 

Method 2 (If Method 1 does not Work):

1. Download openal soft from https://openal-soft.org
2. Put file from Win32/soft_oal.dll as OpenAL32.dll to Windows/SysWOW64 and file from Win64/soft_oal.dll as OpenAL32.dll to Windows/system32, override if necessary
3. Delete OpenAL32.dll from binaries in game directory
4. Put this:

[ISACTAudio.ISACTAudioDevice]
MaxChannels=128
UseEffectsProcessing=True
TimeBetweenHWUpdates=15
MinOggVorbisDurationGame=20
MinOggVorbisDurationEditor=4
DeviceName=
ReserveChannels=2
TotalAvailableChannels=128
UseEffectsProcessing=True

To BIOEngine.ini in config directory in path like Mass Effect Legendary Edition\Game\ME1\BioGame\Config, make it read-only so game doesn’t override it. There should be already section like ISACTAudio.ISACTAudioDevice so put it there

5. Run alsoft-config.exe from openal-soft-{version}-bin\alsoft-config and set your desired channels – in my case it’s 7.1 and click apply, you can try other options, whatever seem to be better for you
6. (Optionally) go to %appdata%, there should be file alsoft.ini and you can try adding two options there:

volume-adjust = 6
front-stablizer=true

volume-adjust increases overall sound volume -24 to 24
front-stablizer – mixes sound from left and right channel to center
7. Just run a game, you should have surround sound working fine now
8. If it doesn’t work try restarting your PC
9. Also it might work if you replace dll only in a binaries folder.

Credit to Juri

 

Here are two methods we share to fix this issue. if these methods do not work for you. please let me know.

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