Some users report sound effects that sound like noise or are way too loud.

The issue appears intermittently. I have not reproduced it and don't know what the cause is either.

The game is based on MonoGame, Windows using the default sound libraries.

It is being reported by people with headphones, speakers, some with surround sound, and some without. It may have something to do with USB connected speakers/headphones, though am not sure.

1: "everytime i clicksomthing like change the game speed a loud crashing sound comes from the game. I use the Bose Companion 5."

2: "Every time I click on a button (on the right) I have an unpleasent sound coming from my right rear speaker. No sounds come from the other 4 speakers. I have a 5.1 setup."

3: "I have the same problem with my Logitech G430.
Unfortunately switching from 7.1 to stereo does not solve my problem."

4: "The problem is 5.1 or 7.1 headphones with external controller. Like mine Razor Megalodone.
Switching mode of 7.1 in normal stereo is completely solved the problem."

I would appreciate any help on this, since I don't even know how to troubleshoot it.

We are using the out of the box sound library from MonoGame. This calls into MediaPlayer libraries I believe.

The sounds are in mono because we control the left/right panning from code.

Sounds very much like the sound buffers aren't getting updated often enough and the sound is playing garbage bytes.

If that's the cause, how can it be fixed?

The users are reporting that only the UI sound effects show the problem, the environment sounds are fine. So I will find out what the difference is.

If that's the cause, how can it be fixed?

It is just a guess, but it can be a problem with wildly varying hardware setups, and can give noise / glitches like this. On the other hand it could be something else .. it is hard to diagnose remotely based on a small amount of info, which might be why you got few answers.

Sorry I can't tell you how to fix sound buffer issues as I've never used monogame, and it is not necessarily a simple problem to fix. You'll have to do some detective work. If it *is* the problem then the thread / callback that is responsible for filling the round robin sound buffers may not be doing it in time (say if something else is monopolising the CPU), or the buffer sizes are too small / big etc. Have a look through the docs for the API you are using. A quick google suggests someone had a similar problem when using the garbage collector with monogame:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14590724/monogame-sound-glitches

That the UI sound effects have the problem and not the environment is interesting and is worth investigating. Maybe you are doing something super CPU intensive in response to UI clicks and preventing the sound updating.

MonoGame uses SharpDX for audio.

This seems to only happen in Dolby 5.1 and 7.1 modes. Stereo mode is fine...