I hadn't played Fallout 3 for quite a few months and decided to get back into it after patching to 1.7.

I've now noticed that if I turn down the music volume slider to zero it's not just the music that stops playing. I can also no longer hear any other in-game audio such as my footsteps as I move, NPC voices, gunshots and even game menu interface clicks. The Radio music still plays fine with Music volume at zero though. If I turn the music volume levels up I can hear everything again.

Isn't it a bit dumb to tie non-music effects into the music volume level setting? What is the point of having Voice and Effects voume sliders if the Music slider controls everything?

I'm playing on Windows 7 64-bit, 2Gb Ram, SoundBlaster X-FI Xtreme Gamer. SounbBlaster drivers were updated an hour ago after encountering this problem in Fallout 3. Also note that all my other games (Dragon Age: Origins, World of Warcraft, StarCraft 2, Silent Hunter 5 and other games are not having issues seperating music levels from basic sound effects and NPC speech.

Is no one else seeing this behaviour?

Any confirmation that this is just how the game audio is supposed to work would be helpful so that I'm not trying to chase down a solution to a problem that's just a hard-coded, shoddy audio design choice.

If you want to turn off the music, you're better off doing it in the ini file rather than through your options. In your FalloutPrefs.ini file look for this line and set it to 0:

fDefaultMusicVolume

I set that variable to 0 and when I got into the game, the music was still playing. However, when I now move the slider down to the minimum, it no longer affects the other audio channels, so everything is now fine in my post-apocalyptic world.

A strange solution to the problem but it works. Thanks for the suggestion

Sigh. Spoke too soon.

I now have a different problem. All audio effects are now tied to the Radio volume level. Raising and lowering that adjusts ALL sounds in the game. Also, if I go to my wrist computer and turn the radio on and off, all sound in the game turns on and off.

Just what the F is happening here? I never used to have all this hassle 8 months ago when I was playing this game through for the first time. Have some of the latest patches broken something. Audio in all my other games is just fine and dandy

You might want to consider re-installing. It sounds like something got screwed along the way. Your sounds should not be combined to the same controls like that.

Reinstalling did not solve the problem.

Adding the Fallout 3 root directory to Creative Labs' Alchemy sound tool did the trick though. It seems Fallout 3 is just having sound problems on Windows systems that do not natively support hardware sound acceleration, namely Vista and Windows 7. This problem does not appear if I play on my Windows XP boot drive.

Fallout 3 is the only game I have had to add to Alchemy. All my other games including Civ IV and V, Dragon Age, GTA IV, Mass Effect etc work fine.