[closed] Audio Device issues in the Player

[zenvideo]

I'm seeing some inconsistent behaviour with audio playback which might, if it were fully documented, be classed as a "feature", but since it doesn't seem to be mentioned in the Help file I'll call it a bug.

This is happening under Win 7 64 Pro & VB v1.33, with two audio devices (which we'll call A and B), of which device A is the Windows default, and two or more Player modules. In my case, device A is the on-board SoundMax device on an Asus P6T, and device B is a SB X-Fi soundcard.

With VB in its default settings, all audio from the Players is routed to device A, and if I play several media files simultaneously I hear all the audio mixed together on the device A speaker/line output.

If I set all the Players to play audio through device B's speaker/line output and set them all going, I only get one stream of audio from a single Player(i.e. no mixing), and that's from the most recently loaded video file. In fact the act of loading a video file into one Player whilst another is playing a video file will switch the audio focus away from the running Player and onto the freshly loaded file (even though it's not yet playing).

With audio-only files, the behaviour is slightly different, in that video seems to take priority over audio. Load an audio file whilst video is playing in another Player and the audio output stays with the video that's playing. In fact, to get the audio file to play, you have to "unload" video from all the other Players (by loading them with audio-only files) before you can get the audio that was first loaded to play in its Player.

So, overall, I think what I'm seeing is that in any group of Players with audio routed to a single non-default audio device, any video file will take priority over any audio-only file and prevent playback of the audio-only files, and the most recently loaded video file will take priority over any previously loaded video files.

So I guess this feature was probably intended for routing one single player to one single audio device output, in which mode it will behave as expected. However, if you want to send a sub-group of modules to a single output (to an external mixer), it doesn't behave in a very predictable way at present - at least not here it doesn't (!)

You might ask why I wasn't using the new Audio Player for audio-only files? (a) you can't route it to a different audio device, (b) it doesn't have a loop function.

[Mike]

Sounds (no pun intended) like B does not support multiple audio streams (in different formats), although I find that odd for a SB sound card. So it's neither a bug nor a feature :) I'll see if there's anything I can find out about this.

[Mike]

Martin, can you try this? Set the audio devices to A, then restart VB (so all files are loaded again), then set the audio devices back to B and confirm the problem is still there.

[zenvideo]

Martin, can you try this? Set the audio devices to A, then restart VB (so all files are loaded again), then set the audio devices back to B and confirm the problem is still there.

I've done that, and the problem remains.

I've also done a more significant test, which is to swap which hardware acts as devices A & B. In other words I have made the SB X-Fi the Windows default (A) and not the SoundMax (which now acts as B). After doing that, everything works the same way in terms of "device A & device B", but now it's the SB hardware which performs as expected and the SoundMax which doesn't. So it's looking like neither the hardware nor the low-level soundcard drivers are causing the problem, but how the devices are seen by Windows (and the DirectSound layer)?

[Mike]

Yes, AFAIK if the card does not supports mixing Windows adds another layer that does that. Apparently it can only do that for one device, the default in this case. I have simple devices that have the same problem, but also devices that work fine, which supports this. But I am still confused why a SoundBlaster card does not support this natively.

Anyway, this is not a bug so I'll close this now.

PS: this problem will go away when I have written the new mixer module as you can use that for mixing.

[zenvideo]

I have simple devices that have the same problem, but also devices that work fine, which supports this.

PS: this problem will go away when I have written the new mixer module as you can use that for mixing.

Perhaps in the interim you could list the devices you've tested that work OK, if only here on the forum?