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Author Topic: volume control with wdm driver  (Read 3977 times)

orangeart

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volume control with wdm driver
« on: November 15, 2014, 02:55:33 am »

Hi all,

Yesterday I installed jriver on my grocery and managed to route the audio out to my behringer audio interface, add crossover filter, delay etc and then on to my active speakers no problem. It's pretty trick being able to this and then use the system to listen to what ever I want from where ever I want 😃

There are a couple of things I can't get my head around though. Firstly I can see the new jriver driver system volume slider in the Windows system tray, moving this moves the volume slider in jriver in tandem and moving the slider in jriver moves the system slider in tandem which is what I expected to happen, however it doesn't actually change the volume which is not what I was expecting, is this expected behaviour? If so how am I supposed to control the volume?

Secondly and not so important but my fca610 has a slider to set the asio latency for the device and jriver also has a drop down to set the latency for the device,, these don't follow each other though does that mean they are additive or is one ignored?

Going to give convolution a go later although just having mc running with my xo and routing has really hammered the system speed so convulutuion may be out of the question on this pc (acer revolution rl 80)

Thanks

Stefan

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orangeart

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Re: volume control with wdm driver
« Reply #1 on: November 16, 2014, 05:51:15 am »

Little bump, anyone got any idea?

Stefan
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JimH

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Re: volume control with wdm driver
« Reply #2 on: November 16, 2014, 06:47:48 am »

MC has several types of volume (system, internal, etc).  You might try those.
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mwillems

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Re: volume control with wdm driver
« Reply #3 on: November 16, 2014, 10:12:56 am »

Hi all,

Yesterday I installed jriver on my grocery and managed to route the audio out to my behringer audio interface, add crossover filter, delay etc and then on to my active speakers no problem. It's pretty trick being able to this and then use the system to listen to what ever I want from where ever I want 😃

There are a couple of things I can't get my head around though. Firstly I can see the new jriver driver system volume slider in the Windows system tray, moving this moves the volume slider in jriver in tandem and moving the slider in jriver moves the system slider in tandem which is what I expected to happen, however it doesn't actually change the volume which is not what I was expecting, is this expected behaviour? If so how am I supposed to control the volume?

Some ASIO drivers bypass the system volume; you should set JRiver's volume control to "internal" as Jim suggested and leave the WDM driver volume in the systray at maximum.

Quote
Secondly and not so important but my fca610 has a slider to set the asio latency for the device and jriver also has a drop down to set the latency for the device,, these don't follow each other though does that mean they are additive or is one ignored?

MC respects the ASIO buffer settings set in the ASIO control panel option under device options in MC, but ignores the normal output buffering setting (i.e. it should be doing what your device's control panel says for latency when using ASIO).

Quote
Going to give convolution a go later although just having mc running with my xo and routing has really hammered the system speed so convulutuion may be out of the question on this pc (acer revolution rl 80)

Try a shorter convolution filter (lower taps) and see if that helps, it should reduce the load a little.
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orangeart

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Re: volume control with wdm driver
« Reply #4 on: November 17, 2014, 07:38:28 am »

Thanks for that mwillems, very specific and thanks to Jim also.

I'll give that a go when I get home tonight for the volume control, presumably if at some point I get a remote IR receiver that will work whatever I set the jriver volume to? Anyone out there got an Apple IR remote working with MC20?

I never got round to trying my convolution filters yet, that might take me a little more working out!! But my channel routing / filters / delay etc seem to be working just fine. I've been able to sell my miniDSP minisharc and my buffalo DACs are up for sale so this will have made me quite a saving :-) Ultimately the audio from the behringer isn't as good as the audio from the Buffalos but it will afford me mucho flexibility for speaker building which is nice!!

Thanks for the heads up on the ASIO buffer setting, so basically ignore the output buffer in jriver, and set the buffer in my device control panel. The buffer for the behringer is only about 5ms which works just fine but presumably as my DSP gets fancier i'll need to add some playback buffer to MC20, I just want to get into my head the order in which this gets processed, I assume the playback buffer takes precedence and then my device buffer after that? Or would I need to set my device buffer to a sum of the playback buffer set in MC20 + it's own minimum latency? Given that I'd only be using MC as the WDM driver and not actually using the rest of the software (save for the DSP) I assume I can just calculate the length of the playback buffer as a function of the amount of taps/sample position, plus a little more to be on the safe side?

Thanks for any help, sorry to be a pain, I'm not really into fiddling with sliders without understanding at least a little of what is going on under the hood.

Oh one more thing which maybe I should start a different thread about? Is there anyway in MC20 to change the names of the output channels? I've got my output set to 10 channels and I guess I was expecting those channels to show up with the names they are given in the ASIO control panel for the behringer rather than left,right,centre,sub, etc...Maybe it's a future feature request, I guess there must be a request thread around here somewhere.


Thanks everyone again, I'm really enjoying using this flexible software, maybe bits of it are a little counter intuitive interface wise, which I guess is always a function of a piece of software growing beyond it's original intention, that said the amount of stuff it can do and Matt's commitment to bringing all those tools to us users is to be very highly commended.

Stefan

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mwillems

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Re: volume control with wdm driver
« Reply #5 on: November 17, 2014, 08:08:34 am »

Thanks for the heads up on the ASIO buffer setting, so basically ignore the output buffer in jriver, and set the buffer in my device control panel.

Sort of; if you open up the device settings for your ASIO device in JRiver, you'll see an button for "ASIO control panel."  That's the relevant buffer setting, but with every ASIO device I've used it just opens up a small version of the device's own control panel.  But double check and make sure as that's the setting JRiver is paying attention to for the output buffer.

Quote
The buffer for the behringer is only about 5ms which works just fine but presumably as my DSP gets fancier i'll need to add some playback buffer to MC20, I just want to get into my head the order in which this gets processed, I assume the playback buffer takes precedence and then my device buffer after that? Or would I need to set my device buffer to a sum of the playback buffer set in MC20 + it's own minimum latency? Given that I'd only be using MC as the WDM driver and not actually using the rest of the software (save for the DSP) I assume I can just calculate the length of the playback buffer as a function of the amount of taps/sample position, plus a little more to be on the safe side?

If you're using the WDM driver there's an additional source of latency which is JRiver's input buffer.  You can set that under Audio-->Options-->Advanced-->live playback latency.  That setting plus the output buffer for your ASIO device should be close to your minimum total latency when using the WDM driver.  But two caveats:

1) Just because the Behringer is reporting 5ms as the output latency doesn't mean that's actually true (unless that 5ms is an actual measurement you took).  Almost every piece of audio equipment I've ever had that self-reported latency has "lied" about the latency, sometimes by quite a bit.  It can be as much as double that. 

2) If you use latency producing processing (i.e. convolution) it will add additional delay.  JRiver doesn't try to "fit" the DSP into the buffer provided, it just takes as much time as it needs for the DSP.  In the case of a convolution filter the general formula for latency is (taps / 2) / sampling rate.  So a 8800 tap filter at 44.1KHz would be about 100ms of added delay.

So your real-world latency using convolution and the WDM driver will be approximately: JRiver live playback latency + convolution delay + actual output latency.  If that total gets much higher than 25 or 30ms you'll likely begin to notice lipsync issues.  IME if it gets much above 50ms lipsync is completely blown.  The film standard for lipsync is less than 22ms, the TV standard is less than 45ms. 

All that's irrelevant for audio, but for web video through the WDM driver it more or less rules out conventional convolution filters with many thousands of taps.

Quote
Oh one more thing which maybe I should start a different thread about? Is there anyway in MC20 to change the names of the output channels? I've got my output set to 10 channels and I guess I was expecting those channels to show up with the names they are given in the ASIO control panel for the behringer rather than left,right,centre,sub, etc...Maybe it's a future feature request, I guess there must be a request thread around here somewhere.

It's been discussed before, but there's currently no way to rename them.  You can change the order using the "order channels" filter, which can be helpful.  The default order of the channels is different in 5.1 and 7.1 because that's the standard.  In 5.1 the channels are 0=L, 1=R, 2=C, 3=S, 4=SL, 5=SR.  In 7.1 the channels are 0=L, 1=R, 2=C, 3=S, 4=RL, 5=RR, 6=SL, 7=SR.

Quote
Thanks everyone again, I'm really enjoying using this flexible software, maybe bits of it are a little counter intuitive interface wise, which I guess is always a function of a piece of software growing beyond it's original intention, that said the amount of stuff it can do and Matt's commitment to bringing all those tools to us users is to be very highly commended.

You'll be amazed what you can do with JRiver if you stick with it.
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orangeart

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Re: volume control with wdm driver
« Reply #6 on: November 17, 2014, 09:48:42 am »

Great answers, thanks so much. So when I do start using convolution I don't need to add the extra time to either of the buffers, it just takes as long as it takes plus my other buffers, great.

In reality I've found lip sync to be much more tolerant that the BBC 45ms you alluded to earlier. Most slightly older or middle of the road LCD type TV's have plenty of video latency as part of their own internal processing, at least 10-15 but my old sony has about 40ms so by time I've added some latency for my audio of say a couple of thousand taps - 25ms, the video is still lagging the audio very slightly!!

OK I think I've got this down now  :)

oh hold on, is the live playback (input buffer) variable depending on system performance? Is there a rule of thumb for getting this set?

Thanks again

Stefan
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mwillems

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Re: volume control with wdm driver
« Reply #7 on: November 17, 2014, 09:51:44 am »

oh hold on, is the live playback (input buffer) variable depending on system performance? Is there a rule of thumb for getting this set?

Set it at the lowest number of milliseconds that doesn't produce pops/distortion.  Try a few settings.  I've been able to get it down to 10ms on most of my hardware, but some hardware needs larger buffers.
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orangeart

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Re: volume control with wdm driver
« Reply #8 on: November 17, 2014, 10:21:19 am »

Great, all set now.......for now, back again soon I expect!!
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