2011-01-17, 12:07 PM
I have a USB sound card going into my stereo system on my XP machine. The sound effects in Som would make a lot of clicking around the beginning and end of each clip.
I have a nice HD surround sound output on the box (it's designed for home entertainment) but the USB is an FM transmitter so I can have music pumped into stereos around the house. Otherwise the USB card is pretty cheap... especially for mixing purposes. I wish windows would clone the output so I could use both outs, like a cloned dual head display, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.
Anyway at first I tried using Ex to control the sound device used. Software was not offered as a device, the way it was for graphics in Som day. Ex can let you select a different device if you want, if you have more than one. Something I may do in my case.
But I found under XP in dxdiag you can disable acceleration for your sound cards. This did the trick. As I understand it DirectSound under Vista and 7 no longer use hardware acceleration at all, so there is no such option. And if you have a nice sound card I guess you're not getting any performance benefit from DirectSound games. Apparently game makers have to use OpenAL and other libraries to support hardware accelerated sound now
I also did everything to try to force the sound to software from inside Ex. Near as I can tell this had no effect. You'd think forcing everything to software would be the same as disabling acceleration, but it's not... and probably is ignored/unreliable from my results anyway. This would be understandable if the card had to do everything in either accelerated or unaccelerated mode. But I found I could turn off acceleration and start up a program, then turn it back on, and it would not affect that program. Meaning it could probably be tailored on a per program basis, but that doesn't appear to be an option. There is no way to change "acceleration" programmatically it seems.
Anyway my Taskmanager says I have four CPUs (two must be hyperthreading) so having one of them for fulltime unaccelerated audio is probably not a problem. I'm pretty sure they burn as much power whether they're used or not.
Anyway, for XP users, might as well suggest disabling DirectSound acceleration when discussing DirectDraw/3D acceleration. Turning off sound acceleration anyway is pretty harmless.
I have a nice HD surround sound output on the box (it's designed for home entertainment) but the USB is an FM transmitter so I can have music pumped into stereos around the house. Otherwise the USB card is pretty cheap... especially for mixing purposes. I wish windows would clone the output so I could use both outs, like a cloned dual head display, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.
Anyway at first I tried using Ex to control the sound device used. Software was not offered as a device, the way it was for graphics in Som day. Ex can let you select a different device if you want, if you have more than one. Something I may do in my case.
But I found under XP in dxdiag you can disable acceleration for your sound cards. This did the trick. As I understand it DirectSound under Vista and 7 no longer use hardware acceleration at all, so there is no such option. And if you have a nice sound card I guess you're not getting any performance benefit from DirectSound games. Apparently game makers have to use OpenAL and other libraries to support hardware accelerated sound now
I also did everything to try to force the sound to software from inside Ex. Near as I can tell this had no effect. You'd think forcing everything to software would be the same as disabling acceleration, but it's not... and probably is ignored/unreliable from my results anyway. This would be understandable if the card had to do everything in either accelerated or unaccelerated mode. But I found I could turn off acceleration and start up a program, then turn it back on, and it would not affect that program. Meaning it could probably be tailored on a per program basis, but that doesn't appear to be an option. There is no way to change "acceleration" programmatically it seems.
Anyway my Taskmanager says I have four CPUs (two must be hyperthreading) so having one of them for fulltime unaccelerated audio is probably not a problem. I'm pretty sure they burn as much power whether they're used or not.
Anyway, for XP users, might as well suggest disabling DirectSound acceleration when discussing DirectDraw/3D acceleration. Turning off sound acceleration anyway is pretty harmless.