playing large wav.files

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radio42
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Re: playing large wav.files

Post by radio42 »

What you describe does sound like it has nothing to do with the initial topic.
It sounds like ove time your twi diiferent soundcards drift apart.
This typically happens, when the two soundcards doesn't run at the same sample rate.
Note, that evn if your soundcards might be set to the same samplerate (e.g. 44100 Hz), then don't exactly play/run at 44100Hz!
E.g. one might actually run at 44090Hz and the other one at e.g. 44120Hz.
A typical bahaviour for some consumer soundcards, like yours.

Youmight try to use a different driver model, e.g. WASAPI (if you are on Win7) or even better try to use ASIO.
If your soundcards doen't have a native ASIo driver (what I assume), you might try to use ASIO4ALL.
szal77
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Re: playing large wav.files

Post by szal77 »

I now changed my setup such that I eliminated all non-real-time channels from ProppFrexx by setting channel [2] to ASIO (via ASIO4All) and channel [3] to WASAPI. I would prefer to use WASAPI for channel [2] too, but that will only run on 48 kHz, which the DSP processor doesn’t play with.

And now the surprise: Nothing lags… except channel [2], which is even behind channel [3] which is copied from channel [2]! How can this be explained?
szal77
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Re: playing large wav.files

Post by szal77 »

Another setup amendment: I changed channel [2]’s driver model to NONE and created a new channel, which I will call [4] for the purposes of this thread, which takes a copy of the signal from channel [2] to be monitored on the headphones. Channel [4] is then further copied to channel [3] for speaker output (muted or unmuted as desired). [4] and [3] are both WASAPI, but outputting to different sound cards. Now, over time, channel [3] starts lagging again. In this setup it is not important to minimize latency for channel [3], but I thought I’d report this finding nonetheless.
szal77
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Re: playing large wav.files

Post by szal77 »

radio42 wrote:Btw, which DSP are you using (as theoretically this might also introduce lags, if badly implemented)?
One of the Winamp DSPs included with ProppFrexx (I suspect that it’s one and the same, even though the selection window shows five of them, but the names are the same, only amended with a consecutive number), with the ‘Cleanest’ setup as a basis for my own settings.

As I said, with the last setup amendment, the only thing that lags, afaics as of yet, is the channel that outputs to the speakers, which isn’t really an issue, so I guess I can live with that. What I still have to continue to observe is whether this setup introduces occasional ‘hiccups’ in the playback, short blackouts of a fraction of a second mostly in the vicinity of track changes, which I suspect are CPU-usage-related, as they seem to be less prone to occurring when switching away from the mixer tab to e.g. the cardwall or the search tab.

Might be time to upgrade my hardware to more than 2 cores… ;)
szal77
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Re: playing large wav.files

Post by szal77 »

Just checked: The name of the DSP module is ‘Sound Solution 1.31’, and I find it to be working quite well, except for the fact that it only plays with a sample rate of 44100 Hz. This came with ProppFrexx 3.0.8.x and was never removed (from my installation, that is) when ProppFrexx was updated.
szal77
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Re: playing large wav.files

Post by szal77 »

radio42 wrote:However, most drop-out/hick-ups are NOT CPU related, but rather I/O related.
The CPUs in these days are typically never the bottlenack, but slower hard discs are typically.
Try increasing your buffer settings in this case.
Thanks again. A slight increase of buffer times seems to have done the trick already.
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radio42
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Re: playing large wav.files

Post by radio42 »

As explained, it is always the same, you are using two different soundcards (which are not synchronized), which might they might drift apart over time, as they might internally NOT provide the exact same sample rate.
So if possible try to use only one sondcard (assuming one of your soundcards is a multi-channel one), as this would ensure, that each channel uses the exact same sample rate.

Let me try to explain the 'lags' by comparing it with two people throwing balls to each other.
Assume one person throws the balls faster than the other one: at one point in time the 'slower' person would not be able to catch all the balls anymore.

Btw, which DSP are you using (as theoretically this might also introduce lags, if badly implemented)?

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