Tag Archives: Steam

Audio Fix for Mass Effect on Steam for Linux

Update: This is for the original Mass Effect release on Steam, not Mass Effect Legendary Edition. It’s possible it will work for both, but I haven’t tried it.

I’m a few days late for N7 day, but I figure this information is useful nonetheless!

I’ve always done my Mass Effecting on XBox 360 or XBox One. But now that Steam has many Windows games working on Linux, I figured: what heck, let’s start over again there! (I’m not the only one who plays Mass Effect on loop right? Bueller? Bueller?)

Everything worked like magic right from the get-go, except audio. You’ll probably get sound from the corporate logos, but nothing when you play the game. If you try to turn off hardware audio in the settings, which is culprit, Mass Effect will dutifully turn it back on again.

So, by way of the Arch Linux forums, here’s the fix:

Open up a terminal window.

Make a copy of the existing config, just in case:

cp ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Mass\ Effect/Engine/Config/BaseEngine.ini ~/Desktop/

Edit the configuration file:

gedit ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Mass\ Effect/Engine/Config/BaseEngine.ini

Scroll down to the section with the heading: [ISACTAudio.ISACTAudioDevice]

Copy and paste these two lines right below the heading:

DeviceName=Generic Software
UseEffectsProcessing=False

And that’s it! Fire up Mass Effect, and you should get audio.