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Thread: 8 Channel USB sound device for LaserBoy

  1. #31
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    A few thoughts, in no particular order...

    Spider wants WXP. Boo. Hiss. W98 SE all the way for me...

    But then there's Foobar 2000. I have the last one compiled for W9X, and I like it better than most. WinAmp plugins might be a way to go, but the klunky WinAmp interface sucks. I never liked the fiddly busy little box. I suspect that Media Player Classic might also handle multichannel WAV's. That program is great, just a single executable and an INI file... Uses DirectX codecs too, but has a lot of native support internally. Neither MPC or Foobar look like handling multichannel WAV's though. Foobar won't touch them, MPC plays two main channels but not the rest, and goes into a complex seizure if I try to look at the file properties.

    While Googling to see if FooBar handled multichannels, I immediately saw an interesting suggestion: use FLAC or (better) WavPack, for multichannel. That way you will need a codec but you get BIG lossless compression because laser control waves will be like analog synth forms, highly compressible. You might also neatly sidestep the proprietary WAV format because you won't actually be saving in that format at all. Also, those formats have wide support in many OS's.

    Another idea is wxLua. That's a nice system (portable across many OS's), and appears to have a code example for a small media player. Each time I tried loading a file type listed as ok it said it couldn't handle the file but maybe someone (James?) who knows code might want to look at it to see if it could be good. Lua is much more amenable to code dabblers with rigour but lack of deep grounding in C to edit and make stuff, so if this can be applied to laser controls it might end up getting a following here. Just needs someone knowledgeble enough to sound it out to see if it will go. If it does, it might be ideal because all you need is the wxLua executable and a text editor to start doing useful things. It's a lot more appealing than the usual huge code developer suites, and Lua and wxLua (which is just Lua extended by wxWidgets) is really nice to use, so long as you have a clear idea what you want it to do. We could build our own control wave players with it, hopefully, if nothing else.

  2. #32
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    The ONLY player i have found that works in Vista for multichannel waves and here is why...

    Windows Vista features a completely re-written audio stack based on the Universal Audio Architecture. Because of the architectural changes in the redesigned audio stack, a direct path from DirectSound to the audio drivers does not exist. DirectSound and other APIs such as MME are emulated as WASAPI Session instances. DirectSound runs in emulation mode on the Microsoft software mixer. The emulator does not have hardware abstraction, so there is no hardware DirectSound acceleration, meaning hardware and software relying on DirectSound acceleration may have degraded performance. It's likely a supposed performance hit might not be noticeable, depending on the application and actual system hardware. In the case of hardware 3D audio effects played using DirectSound3D, they will not be playable.
    Third-party APIs such as ASIO and OpenAL are not affected by these architectural changes in Windows Vista. A solution for applications that wish to take advantage of hardware accelerated high-quality 3D positional audio is to use OpenAL. However, this only works if the manufacturer provides an OpenAL driver for their hardware
    not sure why spider works, but it works...

    I believe they will be usinf XAudio2 to fix the issues tho
    Last edited by keeperx; 01-07-2009 at 04:55.
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  3. #33
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    I've been running winamp (www.winamp.com) to play my laserboy wav files, also free

  4. #34
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    in vista??
    or in XP...
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  5. #35
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    Quote Originally Posted by keeperx View Post
    in vista??
    or in XP...
    I've used it in vista & xp

  6. #36
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    well i have not been able to get it to work in vista with winamp... at any rate i know spider works and its less bloated than winamp
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  7. #37
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    Thanks (everyone) for sharing this information. It is very helpful.

    James.

  8. #38
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    your welcome james.. took me a while to figure out why i was having all those issues
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  9. #39
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    Quote Originally Posted by keeperx View Post
    well i have not been able to get it to work in vista with winamp... at any rate i know spider works and its less bloated than winamp

    Oh, I had an issue in vista, but fixed it by going into the output plugin and selecting the usb audio driver with surround support, then had to do some tweaking.

    I'm going to check out your spider player, as I am not happy with all the extra stuff winamp has to it

  10. #40
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    FYI make the USB sound card the primary device before opening spider.. once spider is open you can change it back to secondary (so you can do sound in spaghetti)
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