ASIO Music Player Plugin

[Aurora13]

Originally Posted by Symphy

Aurora,
1. Switch to standard waveout device and increase the "BASS buffer size" setting to its max.
2. I see you play over a network. Opening files that way take more resources. Copy (part of) the album to a local disk and play from there and see what happens.

Tried number 1 and it plays without hickup! Even over the network.
Tried number 2 with ASIO and the hickup is smaller with local files then with network files, but it is still there.

I've got a P4 3,2 GHz which doesn't even come to 50% when it switches with ASIO. So it looks like it has plenty of resources left.

I attached the logfiles with playing through ASIO and local files and debug level on.

Regards,
Aurora

[G5User]

@Symphy

Thanks a lot for this Player!

I'm playing around with Digital room correction and for this purpose it would be nessecary to use "convolving" software. Is it planned to add support for VST-plugins, or anything for "convolving".

Thanks in advance

[carukc]

Hello,

I believe that I have correctly installed the plugin (the debug logs show that the plugin is working) with ASIO4ALL. I had a bit of early trouble but after I figured out that you need to activate the correct WDM device using the ASIO4ALL control panel it seemed to work.

My question has to do with the playback of .dts files. I have configured mediaportal to see dts files and have attempted to tell PureAudio to process them but the configuration screen does not want to save the dts extension to the list. Likewise it will not save the deletion of one of he existing extensions. If I enter dts, click add or remove an existing extension and then click OK the changes are not saved. If I reenter the config screen, the original list of extensions is still in place.

I believe that this is preventing PureAudio from processing my dts files so when one of these files is played, I hear something that sounds like static\ hiss.

Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks
Chris

[carukc]

Hello Again,

It occurred to me that since there was no config info in the plugin directory or the registry the configuration data might be in the mediaportal.xml file. Not surprisingly, it was (I should have looked there first). I have added the extension there and will try when I get home to play the dts file.

Thanks
Chris

[Symphy]

Originally Posted by Aurora13

Tried number 1 and it plays without hickup! Even over the network.
Tried number 2 with ASIO and the hickup is smaller with local files then with network files, but it is still there.

I've got a P4 3,2 GHz which doesn't even come to 50% when it switches with ASIO. So it looks like it has plenty of resources left.

Aurora,
You're right. Your setup should be fast enough with P4 3,2 GHz (I assume you have a decent amount of memory as well). I currently use a Celeron 2.4 for HTPC and even that works fine. Your logs do not show anything unusual. It looks like you have a very peculiar problem there...

However, the fact that using windows waveout with enough buffering does work proofes that it actually is system activity stalling the ASIO audiostream. I see you use an USB device. Now USB datatransfer is known for getting stalled far more easily then when when using a PCI audiocard, so the problem may be related to that.

You may want to google around for problems related to ASIO4ALL and USB, check for newer USB drivers for your mobo and play around with audio drivers. For example try using the standard windows usb audio driver instead of the ones that came with your device.

If i get another idea i'll let you know, but for now i'm out of options.

Regards,
Sieds

Originally Posted by G5User

... I'm playing around with Digital room correction and for this purpose it would be nessecary to use "convolving" software. Is it planned to add support for VST-plugins, or anything for "convolving". ...

G5User,

I'll investigate the possibility to integrate the DSP functionality that is already in MP and see if it's not too complicated to do that without compromising the bitperfect possibilities. I'll get back on this.

Regards,
Sieds

Originally Posted by carukc

...... but the configuration screen does not want to save the dts extension to the list. Likewise it will not save the deletion of one of he existing extensions. ....

Ok you found a bug there. Changes in the list do not get saved. I'll fix that asap. Modifying it in Mediaportal.xml indeed can be used as a workaround till then.

Originally Posted by carukc

I believe that this is preventing PureAudio from processing my dts files so when one of these files is played, I hear something that sounds like static\ hiss.

Because .dts is not associated with PureAudio, MP uses the built in player. And because that one does not perform bitperfect playback, it ends up in hiss when feeded to a DTS decoder.

Regards,
Sieds

[carukc]

Hello,

My pride in finding a workaround was somewhat short lived. The dts file and a similarly encoded wav file are still sound rather like clicky static. The log shows that PureAudio is handling the file but still does not seem to be feeding it to my amp properly.

Winamp with the ASIO plugins and ASIO for all exhibits the same behaviour so I guess that I need to find a way to diagnose ASIO4ALL problems first. mplayer will decode the file down to 2 channel so I know that the file is readable.

Perhaps it has something to do with the beta ASIO4ALL on Vista with the Soundmax 1988 chip. I know that the Soundmax is working because Theatertek, PowerDVD and MediaPortal all relay dts and dolby digital through the optical interface to my receiver correctly. Next I think I'll try the last stable ASIO4ALL drivers to see if that makes a difference.

Any other suggestions?

Many Thanks

[grubi]

Originally Posted by carukc

Hello,

My pride in finding a workaround was somewhat short lived. The dts file and a similarly encoded wav file are still sound rather like clicky static. The log shows that PureAudio is handling the file but still does not seem to be feeding it to my amp properly.

Winamp with the ASIO plugins and ASIO for all exhibits the same behaviour so I guess that I need to find a way to diagnose ASIO4ALL problems first. mplayer will decode the file down to 2 channel so I know that the file is readable.

Perhaps it has something to do with the beta ASIO4ALL on Vista with the Soundmax 1988 chip. I know that the Soundmax is working because Theatertek, PowerDVD and MediaPortal all relay dts and dolby digital through the optical interface to my receiver correctly. Next I think I'll try the last stable ASIO4ALL drivers to see if that makes a difference.

Any other suggestions?

Many Thanks

I can give you only a suggestion I'm sure you won't like.
Simply invest about another 20 EUR and buy one auido card with a C-MEDIA 8738/8768 chip.
Then download the alternate sounddriver from http://cmediadrivers.googlepages.com and forget about ASIO and all the other things causing problems and simply enjoy hasslefree bitperfect audio of 44.1/48/88.2/96 kHz and properly passthroungh of AC3 (DTS and DD).

A list of tested soundcards is available on the link I supplied.


grubi.

[Symphy]

Originally Posted by grubi

....Simply invest about another 20 EUR and buy one auido card with a C-MEDIA 8738/8768 chip. Then download the alternate sounddriver from http://cmediadrivers.googlepages.com and forget about ASIO and all the other things causing problems....

If those drivers do what they promise (can't test) this is probably a very good solution if you want to route everything over s/pdif, far better then ASIO4ALL, which is actually a wrapper around existing wdm drivers. However, if you have a device with proper native ASIO support, there's no reason not to use that.

For good quality analog out though, my advice would be to steer away from low budget cards.

Regards,
Sieds

[grubi]

Originally Posted by Symphy

If those drivers do what they promise (can't test) this is probably a very good solution if you want to route everything over s/pdif, far better then ASIO4ALL, which is actually a wrapper around existing wdm drivers. However, if you have a device with proper native ASIO support, there's no reason not to use that.

For good quality analog out though, my advice would be to steer away from low budget cards.

Regards,
Sieds

I fully agree with you, however I'm using theses drivers now for six month and since I switched to them I did not have a single problem. Before it was a real pain to get things reliable and esp. bitperfect to work properly beside AC3 passthrough. You are right to steer away from low budget for analog output, but I tend to stear away from analog output via HTPC altogether. If you simply pass through digital signal a C-MEDIA 8738/8768 is all you need and I have no problem to feed my 30K EUR audio equipment with it.

grubi.

[Symphy]

Originally Posted by grubi

...You are right to steer away from low budget for analog output, but I tend to stear away from analog output via HTPC altogether...

Yep, using an good external DAC is the best way to do things.

Grubi, do you have experience playing .ac3 files in MP? I'm playing around with it and i noticed that the BASS library, which my plugin is also based on, is actually not performing passthrough, but decodes them into 6 channels, and that in a totally wrong channel order. Now for the channelorder being wrong there's a fix available on un4seen.com, but routing that to s/pdif would result in only front-left and front-right being passed. Can you confirm that?

Sieds