Odd Problems by Elven Spellmaker at 3:29 PM EST on January 24, 2010
Hi,
I got a machine last year, which of course had Vista. Now Vista works fine for me in most cases (Except that it decides it can't hibernate without freezing on wakeup -.-), but without a Hardware Direct Sound, the 8channel file from Mario Kart Wii wouldn't play. So, I switched output plugin to Winamp OpenAL Output Plug-in.
My old SoundCard (SoundBlaster Live! Digital [And the Value Dell version too]) don't work on Vista, as Creative said, they want to FORCE people to buy new sound cards...
Basically the plugin, allows me to get the full hardware support that a chip has. (Yes, I'm still using the internal chip, so its obviously not going to be great) however it allows me to play this 8channel file.
It only supports 8 and 16bit output, which is fine, as I've never heard a difference between 16 and 24bit or 32bit.
SNESAmp works, but if I change the Sample rate to 192,000Hz, the files play slowly and transposed down. All the other options have NO effect on the sound, its odd that one does.
Also I can't seek properly in VGMStream files. Seeking takes a large amount of time, about 2 minutes to move 1 second.
I assume these are problems with the output plugin and nothing to do with VGMStream or SNESAmp, but I'd just like to check.
Seems like a driver issue and nothing to do with the chiptune plugins. You can use builtin audio you know, they're considerably of better quality nowadays.
Probably your card resamples frequencies above 48 or 44.1khz and the resources required for resampling 192khz audio are just too high for your card.
If you used the command line program included with VGMStream, you can create a stereo WAV of the 8 channel audio track that will play, even through software acceleration.
software acceleration will use your CPU instead of the sound card so you may yield better performance at 192khz especially since it won't be resampled.
Its a Realtek onboard chip and its currently set to output at 24-bit 192,000kHz. No matter what I do to that it makes no difference to the output (Slow seek and weird SNES output at 192,000).
Does anyone know why the VGMStream would take so long to seek with Open AL plugin enabled?