Temporary Deafness

It's Nice to Hear the Volcano Pele Erupting Again!

Temporary Deafness

For a long time now I've not heard sounds made by objects in Second Life.

I've not been in world much because I'm catching up with five-and-a-half years of neglect to my property. I've spent the past weeks raking leaves, pulling ivy, removing crud from my decks, and washing the house. I've been doing little projects on my Miata, too.

So mostly I've been logging into SL to check prims on my sims.

At first I didn't notice my deafness. I was still hearing the wind sounds, could hear voice, could hear the radio and media streams-- but I wasn't hearing the interface clicks or the Instant Message bell, and wasn't hearing the many surf and bird sounds on Whimsy.

The problem, by the way, was specific to Phoenix. I was able to hear sounds in Firefox and in V. 1.23.

After checking my audio settings, I thought the problem was most likely a corrupted file, so I uninstalled and reinstalled Phoenix.

My deafness persisted.

I sent a message to the Phoenix Viewer people, and got a reply telling me I should zap the hidden files on my hard drive. I turned on the ability to see the hidden folders that contained those files and deleted them (after uninstalling Phoenix). When I reinstalled the viewer, I was still deaf.

I was getting frustrated-- especially since I had managed to delete five years of chat logs (fortunately I have them recently backed up on an external drive).

I took a last look at preferences and noticed Phoenix allowed me to set the location for sound files.

I vaguely remembered setting that, thinking object sounds might play faster if cached.

Nothing happened, but when I relogged, I was no longer deaf.

It's so nice to be able to hear again!