We shouldn’t really go throught all that imo, fault is on their side, not ours since it’s happening for more then few >_>
I have missing/lagging sounds problem and freezes in all WoW clients from Classic to SL PTR.
never had any problems with i9 / 2080/ 16gb 3000mhz / win10 pro 64bit but the game started freezing with sound bugs today. deactaivating the background download of the future patch made it better although the game crashed after some time instead of freezing …
Fixed. Thanks m8! 
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I honestly dont feel like it has anything to do with your hardware… It is happening for all kinds of different hardware, it seems. So it is probably software related to wow and/or bnet app. Did you make sure you removed all leftover files after uninstalling both apps? Also after you have uninstalled, and removed all the related files you can - do a reboot of your machine to make sure no processes are running in the background related to the two apps still… Then start from fresh from there when machine is started up again and you cant see any blizard related processes in the activity monitor. You have to delete all files otherwise a clean install will still have some leftovers.
Didn’t saw that in previous posts. The described effect quite often show up when there are storage related problems - all RAM used, SSD almost full, CPU heavily used by other process etc - but that’s easy to spot. If that’s not the case then it can be something with WoW data archives.
I tried to get this bug yesterday and could not so I was curious if it’s related to downloading prepatch as I just let the client download it few days ago.
High CPU usage could indicate something with their data files (like CASC) as they can decompress, index, compress it which is similar to operations on ZIP files - scales to all cores.
Audio problems aside of the easy to spot causes mentioned above can happen if the game can’t access the files and that’s likely in MPQ archives. The client/updater may want to change such archive or some file index blocking even read access for the game. Something they are trying to debug apparently: Fully installed WoW is downloading on background? - #9 by Mosinathus
same issue here. the freeze happens when certain sounds are gonna play, like leaving dalaran and the new zone music is gonna play or in kings rest where the ghosts are and you press the altar and they disappear, theres a sound effect that plays which causes the freeze. basically when a new sound is gonna play it can happen. I disabled sound in the ingame settings which fixed the freezes but its disorienting playing m+ etc without any audio cues.
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Okay, the latency issues seem gone. Still dunno what was responsible, all I know is my browser would work fine during those big lag spikes. As for sound issues, I’ve exclusively and frequently seen them in pet battles but nowhere else. Sound effects won’t play, the pet battle music won’t play instead of the zone music, and sometimes sound effects play with a delay either during or after the battle. This started yesterday.
My game is unplayable freezes every 2nd second.
How do we fix this?
This issue started yesterday and I can’t play ever since.
Update: i saw someone say i disabled sound and i can play so i tried that too. and my game stops freezing with sound disabled.
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Yep got this problem too, the game is nearly unplayable in instances with other players because of the freezing. The audio is also very annoying, it’s missing the 90% of the time and then it all randomly comes at once later.
Same here,
yesterday everything was fine.
it happens in retail, classic and PTR!
switching sound sources doesnt help either, turning off sound fixes the freezing
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Same issue. I’m also having the ‘Game data is being downloaded’ problem concurrently. I have experienced: freezes and crashes, CPU usage spikes and audio delays since this problem started. The freezes only turned into crashes yesterday afternoon. It has made the game unplayable.
I have written a ticket and am awaiting a reply.
Same here too… I see the content download circle on the top of the screen, but didn’ cause any problem till 2 days ago. Now when I joining to a group or world boss it just goes unplayable… freezing totally (app not responding - white screen - mouse icon changes to loading one) for 20-45 sec. Sometimes its happening between 1min intervals. Horrible… Why there is no option to just start all the download at once… my client don’t download everything… all the download starts only when I am in the game…
Same here. I am so glad I am not the only one experiencing this problem.
When it first occured yesterday I panicked a bit because there would be Raid Night in the evening. So I did a complete fresh Install of Bnet Launcher, WoW Classic + WoW Current + completely wiped my Nvidia Driver and also did a fresh Install of it.
This fixed it for me - but only temporarily. Today I realized retail had been installed in my native language (German) and not in English like I selected. So I went ahead and installed the English Audio and Language Pack. Afterwards upon loading into the game I was greeted once again with the SAME problem.
Green download circle at the top of the screen while the game is up to date and nothing is being downloaded. Same freezes again, as described all over this post.
Going to revert back to my native language and see if it fixes it. Will report back.
edit: nvm, same problems for people with german client according to https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/de/wow/t/freezes-sowie-fehlender-verzögerter-sound/103183
Hey everyone!
We’ve been seeing reports of this and it was forwarded for investigation and should be fixed as soon as possible 
We don’t have any timeframe on how long this will take, but there is a thread open tracking this on the US forums - you can monitor the progress here
Thanks for the reports!
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I get the same bug. I have tried turning off/on addons, updating, and reverting drivers. It still happens.
I have the same problem since today.
Good to know it´s not just me. Checked on unusual workload on my RAM , CPU or GPU but even while those freezes occur , there is nothing wrong with my system , nothing out of the ordinary. Either it starts with voices , soundeffects or music getting delayed for 10 seconds before returning everything all at once what should have been there and then the freeze occurs , or the freeze occurs and then the music/sounds etc. start to not work properly.
Good to hear it’s being worked on
Turning off sound helped me