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[madbrain]

I upgraded to Media Center 25, but the following is still a problem, unfortunately :
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,118221.msg822967.html#msg822967

Basically, the issue is :

Mediacenter 64-bit + ECHO ASIO driver = no sound
Mediacenter 32-bit + ECHO ASIO driver = sound

Mediacenter 64-bit + Korg DSD DAC ASIO driver = sound
Mediacenter 32-bit + Korg DSD DAC ASIO driver = sound

Reaper DAW 64-bit + ECHO ASIO driver = sound
Reaper DAW 64-bit + Korg DSD DAC ASIO driver = sound

Hauptwerk 64-bit + ECHO ASIO driver = sound

Audio works in all 32/64 bit cases in all apps in non-ASIO mode, so I did not list those.

I'm willing to put significant effort into trying to figure out the reason for the failure in the first case with MC 64-bit and my ECHO soundcard.

I think the program below might help with collecting the API calls and seeing what works or not :
https://github.com/mxmssh/drltrace/blob/master/README.md

[JimH]

I think that's a problem only your sound card manufacturer could solve.  It's their driver.

[mattkhan]

I think his point is that the 64bit driver does work with other 64bit apps so the problem appears to lie in MC

On the other hand, asio works fine for lots of people in MC x64

[JimH]

I think his point is that the 64bit driver does work with other 64bit apps so the problem appears to lie in MC

That doesn't eliminate the possibility of a bug in the driver.

[madbrain]

I think that's a problem only your sound card manufacturer could solve.  It's their driver.

It's possibly a bug in the driver, or it could also possibly be a bug in MC. I am willing to invest cycles determining which it is.

The manufacturer unfortunately has stopped supporting their driver, so if it's a driver bug, then I will have to consider new hardware, which will be very painful as there are not many alternatives that will work.  There are some other Firewire interfaces from Focusrite or MOTU or I can use in place of the ECHO, but those are also all EOL and their drivers have not been updated in years, and are likely no longer supported either, if any other issue comes up between them and MC.

Comparable interfaces sold today come in Thunderbolt only, but my computer isn't Thunderbolt capable. A motherboard upgrade usually entails CPU as well, so that can be quite pricey, on top of the new soundcards. I actually have a combo of two soundcards, ECHO Audiofire 12 and Audiofire 8a. This gives me a total of 20 analog in and 20 analog outs. A Thunderbolt replacement with that many in/outs is likely to cost upwards of a thousands also, if not several thousands, on top of ugprading the PC motherboard. There are no USB solutions on the market that provide a sufficient number of inputs/outputs, to my knowledge.

I hope you can understand why I would like to avoid those $2000+ of expenses if at all possible, when evidence points to at least the possibility that there is an MC bug here.

[mattkhan]

That doesn't eliminate the possibility of a bug in the driver.

well the bug could be in Windows too but the evidence provided says that an MC bug is a plausible root cause as opposed to there being no evidence that it can only be a driver bug.

@madbrain I wouldn't be confident of getting too much attention to a problem that surfaces for one user on one machine. A few suggestions though

- share the MC log from when you attempt to connect (reset the log before opening the device to keep it nice and short), compare this to the 32bit version to look for differences
- can you try connecting it to, and installing MC on, a different machine to rule out some machine specific randomness
- are you sure there is no difference in config between the 32bit and 64bit builds? setting up on a completely fresh machine that has never seen MC before would help rule this out (by providing a completely clean out of the box experience)

[madbrain]

- share the MC log from when you attempt to connect (reset the log before opening the device to keep it nice and short), compare this to the 32bit version to look for differences

I think I shared these logs in the previous thread, and there was nothing obvious from them as to the root cause unfortunately.

- can you try connecting it to, and installing MC on, a different machine to rule out some machine specific randomness

I can certainly try. I have a number of PCs in the house. Not all of them have a Firewire interface to hookup the ECHO devices. I believe I actually tried moving the ECHO to another machine before, and MC64 behaved the same on the two machines - no sound on the ECHO. In that particular case, both PCs had the same Texas Instrument Firewire chipset (same PCIe card). I have some older PCI Firewire cards too to go with older PC, and one motherboard even has a Via chipset on it. One old laptop has Firewire on board as well, running Win7 x64 currently.

- are you sure there is no difference in config between the 32bit and 64bit builds? setting up on a completely fresh machine that has never seen MC before would help rule this out (by providing a completely clean out of the box experience)

I'm confident there was no other config difference. Just alternating the installation of 32 bit and 64 bit builds of MC.  I could do a fresh Win10 install on the same machine, and install just MC64 bit on it. I have spare SSDs and a hotswap bay.
I think I will try on the other computers first. Several of them have never had MC installed on them yet.

[Awesome Donkey]

Personally, I think it's the driver.

Reason I think this is, it works for the 32-bit version of MC but doesn't work for the 64-bit MC and that suggests to me the driver doesn't actually (fully?) support 64-bit... or in this case, 64-bit Media Center. Believe it or not, 64-bit Media Players on Windows are pretty rare, with the most popular still being 32-bit (e.g. foobar2000, Windows Media Player, etc.). I believe there was a discussion not too long ago about ASIO drivers lacking 64-bit support, if I recall correctly).

You mentioned there's no more development on the drivers, how long ago was the last driver update? Honestly with no new driver development, I doubt it'll work with the ECHO.

EDIT: Looked into it a little bit, the last driver for the Audiofire series was released back in 2013 (so it means, for example, it lacks official Windows 10 support). I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't end up ever working with the 64-bit version of Media Player. I have a device with drivers that support 64-bit media players with ASIO, and it works fine. I don't think it's a bug in MC, but an issue with the driver.

[mattkhan]

the driver readme says it has a firewire analyser tool which gives some info about what the driver is doing while in use, have you tried that? what does it say?

[JimH]

The manufacturer unfortunately has stopped supporting their driver, so if it's a driver bug, then I will have to consider new hardware ...

Sorry to hear that.  If it's an old unsupported driver, we can't spend time on it.  Sorry.

Maybe you said, but if the 32 bit version of MC works, why not use that?

[madbrain]

Sorry to hear that.  If it's an old unsupported driver, we can't spend time on it.  Sorry.

Really sorry to hear that also.

Maybe you said, but if the 32 bit version of MC works, why not use that?

Mainly because I have a fairly large audio library, and I think the 4GB process RAM constraint has been an issue in the past in 32-bit mode. I haven't a serious problem with it recently, and I can continue to do that for now. I don't know how much longer it will be OK. When 64-bit software comes out, often the 32-bit version gets discontinued subsequently. That certainly has been the case for a lot of other software I work with and develop in other fields (enterprise software). Maybe I'm assuming incorrectly that this could also happen with MC 32-bit in the near future. If it won't, and MC 32 continues to meet my needs, it might be a non-issue.

[madbrain]

the driver readme says it has a firewire analyser tool which gives some info about what the driver is doing while in use, have you tried that? what does it say?

Last time I tried I believe this tool was related to latency. It helped me determined that I had to disable hyperthreading on my i7 CPU to avoid this type of problems. This is true with a lot of Firewire soundcards.
Hyperthreading also has security implications for processes running on the local machine, so it was a good thing to disable, even though there was a little bit of performance lost there.

[mattkhan]

The readme talks about some status and host stats too

[madbrain]

The readme talks about some status and host stats too

Here is a screen capture of the tool while playing with MC 32-bit :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XblLydaSzrg&feature=youtu.be

And MC-64 bit :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wg6RkfwuTzI&feature=youtu.be

There are buffer counts for both playback and record . With MC 32-bit, both buffer counts are increasing.

With MC 64-bit, only the "record" counts are increasing, but the "playback" counts are staying idle.

[madbrain]

Here is a screen recording of playback with Reaper x64 onto the ECHO soundcard with ASIO .

https://youtu.be/7zgyUitvFm8

In this case, both the playback and record counters are increasing, just like with MC 32-bit.