Resampling Output - Help Please
 

As well as the crappy ESS soundcard that comes standard in my Toshiba notebook, I also have a USB digital audio output device connected to a home theatre stereo receiver. This appears as a second selectable audio device in Win2K.

This works brilliantly for playing CDs, MP3s, and anything else in 44.100Khz format, but since the digital audio device *only* supports output signals at 44.100 KHz anything which tries to pay at less than that - 22.050 for instance - sounds distorted. This means PC games, internet radio, and system sounds all sound distorted.

I'm no kind of expert in this (hence my post) but it seems to me that if Winamp can resample its output from nKHz (where n is the source sample rate) to 44.100 then I'm sorted for Internet radio at least(using an input plugin to read realaudio). But after a lot of searching these forums and the plugins section and Deja and everywhere else I can't find anything that does this. The ideal solution would be for Win2K to resample everything, before outputting it to the device but I can't see any way to do that either.

Here's something curious that may or may not be relevant. The Win2K system sounds, e.g. Windows Logon Sound.wav, are 22.050KHz. If I play that file using Winamp, WMP or Real Player it sounds distorted. If I play it with Musicmatch it comes through perfectly - ergo Musicmatch is doing some resampling that the others listed here aren't.

Some system info:

Digital audio device is a Xitel DG2
http://www.xitel.com/products_dg2.htm

The PC is a Toshiba Portege notebook running Win2K.

The DG2 is connected to the notebook on USB, toslink optical at the receiver end.

I'm running Winamp v2.76.

Any suggestions?

Don

The Sqrsoft advanced crossfading plugin resamples to a given frequency. The resampling isn't very good quality, but it's better than distortion ;)

Did you try switching the Winamp output plugins?

Winamp comes with WaveOut and DirectSound output plugins, that work differently from each other. The default output plugin is WaveOut, so I would recommend to switch to DirectSound and see if that improves / eliminates the distortion.

In order to switch the output plugins, do the following: First off, fire up Winamp. Then you press both CTRL and P together, making the Winamp preferences window to appear. Now you go to Plug-ins -> Output -> highlight Nullsoft DirectSound plug-in v2.0.

Stop playback, if Winamp was playing something, otherwise Winamp won't notice the change of the output plugins. After you highlighted the DirectSound output plugin, let Winamp play a song to see if the situation improved :).

Usually, the soundcard driver takes care of resampling ... Actually all soundcard hardware codecs operate @ either 44.1khz or 48khz, so everything that is below the codec's hardware samplingrate has to be downsampled. Crappy drivers can introduce distortion such as noise and crackling. Windows 2k can be a reason, too, since its WaveOutput support is sort of crappy :(.

Try updating your drivers for your soundcard as well.


Peace.

Thanks Slogra & Budgie. Here's the results of your suggestions.

Budgie - I tried all the standard output options and it didn't make any difference.

Slogra - the Sqrsoft plugin works a treat. Using that in conjunction with innover's realaudio input plugin now allows me to play any realaudio stream at whatever KHz and it comes out at 44.1 and therefore will come through my system.

An unexpected bonus out of this is that after running Winamp with Sqrsoft all sounds are output at 44.1 including sound from a PC game (Unreal Tournament), and the windows system sound files played using WMP or Realplayer. Since these other apps don't use Winamp in any way it seems that something in Win2K gets reset by Winamp (or rather, by Sqrsoft) and that change exists for the remainder of the session. If I reboot then I have to open winamp and play file before these other things will play at 44.1 again.

I wonder what it is in Win2K that gets reset, and whether this can be configured manually somehow.

Anyway, I'm very happy :D - thanks very much for your help.

Don

There are some strange things going on with your sound, but i'm glad it works now :rolleyes:

you can also try to go to: control panel -> Sounds & Media -> Audio tab -> Advanced at Sound playback
Then try to change "Sample rate conversion quality", maybe changing "Hardware acceleration" will help too.

Alright, at least something sort of helps a little :).

I think it must be a glitch within Windows 2000 ... As I said, the WaveOutput of Win2k is pretty badly programmed, and there might be a bug in your soundcard's drivers as well, who knows :confused:.

Anyways, glad to hear it works :D.


Peace.