Some mixer setup questions

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radio42
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Re: Some mixer setup questions

Post by radio42 »

I guess the cardwall and your initial 'it won't play' issue are the same.

You need a physical (none VIRTUAL) mixer channel somehow in your mixer chain to effectively play things!
VIRTUAL mixer channel which are not 'connected' to a final physical output device won't play by itself!

You are using the same ASIO device (ASIO4ALL v2 HD Audio Speaker 1+2) for two different mixer channels: AIR and PFL.
I am not sure, what Asio4All is effectively doing internally, however, this is not possible.
You can ONLY use one physical ASIO device for one mixer channel - otherwise you might get funky results - like you experiance.

One the other hand this means for ASIO: playing and PFLing things in parallel definitly require two different physical ASIO devices.
So I guess in your setup, having only one physical device you can simply not split this between PFL and non-PFL devices by using ASIO!
ASIO always needs exclusive access to its device, so multiple mixer channels can not 'share' the same device like WDM or WASAPI can do.
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radio42
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Re: Some mixer setup questions

Post by radio42 »

v3.0.11.15 fixes that and will enable the scrollbars as desired!
szal77
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Re: Some mixer setup questions

Post by szal77 »

Thank you very much. Very nice.

But I now stumbled on another UI problem. I had the mixer window docked below the playlist area and then set it to auto-hide in order to not be displayed all the time, because the default skin is so CPU-consuming that in some circumstances (e.g. when playing short drop-ins in the playlist) it might cause bumpy playback because that machine’s CPU cannot compute fast enough when loading 2 or even 3 tracks at the same time and still having to refresh the mixer UI. (Some work on the resources consumption of the default skin might be nice too, but that is not what I am about here…)

I then turned auto-hide for the mixer window off and put it back in the tabbed side window where I had it before, then set that to auto-hide. Seeing that it didn’t give me what I wanted—it auto-hid the whole window instead of only the mixer tab—I un-auto-hid it again, and now the carefully set window sizes to the right of the playlist area are messed up.

Can you please put some thought into keeping windows the sizes they were before auto-hiding them when turning auto-hide off? Thank you very much.
szal77
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Re: Some mixer setup questions

Post by szal77 »

On a side note re resources consumption of the default UI (which is always used by the players and the mixer, regardless of what skin one selects): Do you think that, in this respect, the computer would benefit from a dedicated graphics card as opposed to using the on-board graphics chip (Intel GMA 950 in this case)?
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radio42
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Re: Some mixer setup questions

Post by radio42 »

Regarding your resource consumption:
What is your CPU usage? And what machine are you using (type of CPU, main memory, OS etc.)?
I don't believe, that it is really the UI interface or the CPU usage which causes your bumpy playback, but it might more an issue with the I/O sub-subsystem (harddisks) not being fast enough.
Note, that when you say "...when loading 2 or even 3 tracks at the same time..." the I/O sub-system is reading the sample data from the I/O sub-system (i.e. files from the harddisk).
At the same time (when playing back other audio files) your I/O sub-system must be fast enough to constantly deliver the sample data.
If you experiance bumpy playback, this indicates, that your audio buffer might be too small. Try to increase that:
E.g. when using WDM audio drivers you might adjust this in the general settings, section 'General/Audio' - 'Playback Buffer', e.g. set this value to 300ms or higher. In addition you might increase the 'Update Period' to 30ms. If that is not sufficient, try even higher values (400ms/40ms).
When using the WASAPI or ASIO driver model, you might adjust the Buffer-Size directly in the respective Mixer-Channel Configuration Dialog.

In essence you should monitor both the CPU performance and your I/O performance.
In most cases it is the I/O performance which not good enough.
Of course a dedicated graphics card will relieve the CPU from some tasks and resources, but the benefit is typically not as big.


Regarding Window Panel Sizes:
The docking manager is quite complex and flexible.
When you drag or auto-hide a complete container (containing multiple tabbed panels), this applies to the container.
A container is dagged by using the panel header itself.
Else just use a single panel, by dragging its single tab header.
The panels already remember its previous docking state and position.
However, once you dragged a complete container or panel and already docked it to another position, this container can not preserve all its previous docking states and positions.
It will only remember its last state and position.
szal77
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Re: Some mixer setup questions

Post by szal77 »

radio42 wrote:Regarding your resource consumption:
What is your CPU usage? And what machine are you using (type of CPU, main memory, OS etc.)?
Pentium D @ 3 GHz, 3 GB DDR2-667, 160 GB SATA-II HDD @ 7200 rpm, Win7 Pro x86, power regimen set to ‘Performance’, i.e., not scaling down the CPU clock under any circumstances, disabling screensavers and screen power saving, etc.…
radio42 wrote:I don't believe, that it is really the UI interface or the CPU usage which causes your bumpy playback, but it might more an issue with the I/O sub-subsystem (harddisks) not being fast enough.
I’m not saying the I/O subsystem doesn’t play a role here; we had it about that in another thread on this board already. But CPU load definitely has its share in the affair here: During normal playback CPU load is typically at around 30% (according to PFOA; the system load applet on the desktop shows around 50%) with the mixer hidden; when showing the mixer CPU load increases to around 45% (according to PFOA; the system load applet on the desktop shows around 65%). And when hiding the mixer, thus having PFOA consume less CPU time, I so far was not able to reproduce the bumpiness I experienced yesterday on-show. The only thing I noticed so far is that after playing one drop-in I found problematic yesterday, the next track didn’t start at the drop-in’s Next position, but a second or two later, after a loading process finished, and this occurrence should definitely be owed to disk I/O.
radio42 wrote:Note, that when you say "...when loading 2 or even 3 tracks at the same time..." the I/O sub-system is reading the sample data from the I/O sub-system (i.e. files from the harddisk).
At the same time (when playing back other audio files) your I/O sub-system must be fast enough to constantly deliver the sample data.
If you experiance bumpy playback, this indicates, that your audio buffer might be too small. Try to increase that:
[…]
When using the WASAPI or ASIO driver model, you might adjust the Buffer-Size directly in the respective Mixer-Channel Configuration Dialog.
For now I’ve settled on WASAPI, as ASIO4ALL doesn’t seem to like the Sound Solution DSP. But I don’t find any buffer settings for WASAPI in the Windows sound dialogs.
radio42 wrote:Regarding Window Panel Sizes:
[…]
The panels already remember its previous docking state and position.
However, once you dragged a complete container or panel and already docked it to another position, this container can not preserve all its previous docking states and positions.
It will only remember its last state and position.
You mean the container’s state and position? This is what was apparently not the case; after unhiding the container, the PFOA clock (single window) and the container containing among other things the streaming control were larger than before hiding the container.
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Re: Some mixer setup questions

Post by radio42 »

As you are using the 'Sound Solution DSP', please try to remove that in a test and see what the CPU load is now.
On a similar PC (without using any DSP) my CPU is around 10%. So it might be, that the 'Sound Solution DSP' takes around 30-40% of your CPU.
As far as I remember the 'Sound Solution DSP' is very CPU hungry!
So I would like to first evaluate, if the 'Sound Solution DSP' is the main cause of your 'issue'?!
szal77
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Re: Some mixer setup questions

Post by szal77 »

During playback the Sound Solution DSP adds around 15% to the CPU load. Interestingly, the Sound Solution DSP consumes more CPU when playback stops and it has nothing more to do; when resuming playback it will then again settle on the aforementioned 15% load. Thus I have to unload and reload it to get it to proper idle state when I am done playing back.

Without the Sound Solution DSP, CPU load is at around 15% with the mixer hidden, and 30% with the mixer showing (as shown in PFOA; just as said before add 20% to that as shown by the system load applet). Just played a drop-in between two songs, and there were no drop-outs. So I guess leaving the Sound Solution DSP alone would help matters. Only the sound is a bit dull without it, and there is no final limiting then.

So I would also take a recommendation for a DSP module that provides essentially the same functionality as the Sound Solution DSP but is less resource-hungry.
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Re: Some mixer setup questions

Post by Farbo »

Peter
szal77
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Re: Some mixer setup questions

Post by szal77 »

Farbo: Thanks for the tip. Seems to work like a charm. :)

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