With the implementation of the 2.4 patch in Blizzard's World of Warcraft, a few bugs seem to have slipped past the initial testing phase on the Public Test Realms and into the game's live version.

The most recent issue was identified by WoW forum poster Zargg as he explained that the central sound channel seems to have been compromised upon the application of the 2.4 patch. This led to a lack of certain sound clips tied to the hardware sound in the game.

Fortunately, Blizzard Poster Hortus eventually dropped by and gave his verdict regarding the matter by saying:

We have identified this issue with hardware sound. We are working on a fix for a future patch. There is a workaround, you can use software sound, or if you must use hardware sound then set your sound channels to the minimum.

Some forumers tried implementing the suggested workaround with limited success. While reverting to the software sound option returned some of the lost clips, they noted that the sound quality suffered quite a bit as a side-effect.

Hortus warned players not to change the hardware acceleration settings on Windows since this may cause additional problems with other programs. We guess that means that we'll all just have to sit tight and wait for the developers to release a hotfix or some similar solution to this rather sticky situation.