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Topic: Asio Output Plugin For Winamp 2 Goes Open Source (Read 5512 times) previous topic - next topic
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Asio Output Plugin For Winamp 2 Goes Open Source

Reply #1 –
As a newbie, can you tell me why I should use this ASIO output plugin ?
Why did people create this plugin ?

Asio Output Plugin For Winamp 2 Goes Open Source

Reply #2 –
Astonishing quality !

but works with mad output only !

Somebody got the specs  about the plug ? (why is it better ?)

it souds great ! (audigy/harman/kardon/kef) 

I need a controllable volume !  but works fine ! (i've heard problems with -insane lame encoded files i've never heard before ! ) wow !

Asio Output Plugin For Winamp 2 Goes Open Source

Reply #3 –
ASIO (or EASI, GSIF, or any other similar type driver, etc) shouldn't sound any better than any other output method, the only difference is that it is a specification made for extremely low latency monitoring... and for things like MIDI interfaces to software apps like Logic, Cubase, Reaktor, Gigasampler, etc, where you need ~5ms or better latency between MIDI input and sound generation.

Any "difference in quality" that you are hearing is almost surely psychological.

What's interesting about an ASIO output plugin is that on cards which support ASIO, the drivers are usually high quality so it's possible you may get better performance, higher reliability, etc.  Also, depending on how Winamp handles visualization plugins (I don't know), it's possible that with ASIO you could get much lower latency between the actual audio information and the resulting visual effect on screen.  Overall, nothing extremely remarkable, but nice nontheless.

Edit: The one possible exception where ASIO might sound better is as a bypass to AC97 resampling.. but then I don't think there are really many AC97 cards that actually have ASIO drivers in the first place.  Also, looking at the babelfished page, it looks like maybe this plugin makes use of SSRC somehow, but that's a part of the plugin itself and has nothing to do with ASIO.

Asio Output Plugin For Winamp 2 Goes Open Source

Reply #4 –
I too have an Audigy with a 200 Watt home stereo attached.  As well, I use the MAD plugin.  I found that I needed to reconfigure the ASIO plugin to enable resampling and set it to 48000 before I could hear any output. 

Prior to finding this ASIO plugin a few days ago, I used Peter's "SSRC WaveOut plugin" configured to 16-bit 48000 and considered the sound to be near excellent (and significantly better than Peter's DirectSound SSRC plugin, for whatever reason - at least on my system). 

Perhaps it is indeed psychological, but to me the ASIO plugin sounds significantly different (and I think better, although experience has shown that any change initially sounds better to me - just because it's different). 

So I'd have to agree with hellfloyd's assessment - at least as far as MAD and the Audigy is concerned...

Asio Output Plugin For Winamp 2 Goes Open Source

Reply #5 –
I seriously doubt that this plugin sounds "better" in any sort of manner than any of the other output plugins, especially if SSRC was already being used to get around AC97 software resampling.  Have you guys done any sort of blind testing?

Also, since this plugin is now Open Source, it should be possible to find out exactly how it works and how it implements SSRC.  From that, it should be possible to measure the difference in the output between Peter's plugin with SSRC and this ASIO one.  I'd be very surprised if the output differed significantly enough for there to be a readily detectable difference.  Remember that there are to date only a few people who have shown that they can reliably hear an improvement in using SSRC resampling over AC97 software resampling.  The same goes for things like dithering and noise shaping.  A lot of people instantly hear differences, but when it comes to actually testing these differences under blind conditions, those magical quality improvements disappear.

A good example of this type of thing is ff123's MAD challenge: http://www.ff123.net/madchallenge.html

To date, I know of only one person who has successfully been able to hear any sort of difference between MAD and other decoders, and this was only barely.  The difference surely was not great, and apparently MAD was not even clearly "better".

Note:  I'm not saying that high quality resampling, dithering, noise shaping and all of these things don't theoretically offer improvements (in some cases and in some applications, the differences are huge), just that as implemented in many of these plugins, I believe the difference is almost always undetectable by most people.

Asio Output Plugin For Winamp 2 Goes Open Source

Reply #6 –
Quote
(i've heard problems with -insane lame encoded files i've never heard before ! )

Are you sure it is problems with your alt preset insane encoded files or the plugin itself? Somehow I have a hard time believing it is the files fault on that. Apart from the new plugin your setup has not really changed. If you could not hear errors before then why can you now? Perhaps the plugin is introducing them???

Asio Output Plugin For Winamp 2 Goes Open Source

Reply #7 –
When comes to just listening to music, the only difference in using ASIO is that it bypasses soundcard resampling and Windows 2K/XP kmixer.

As to bypassing soundcard resampling, that means that unless you use SSRC resampling, you can only use native sampling rate of your soundcard (48 KHz for Creative cards). If this respect, there should be no difference using ASIO + SSRC or the regular wave driver + SSRC. This is what happens in Win9X/Me operating systems.

As to kmixer in Win2K/XP, ASIO allows the use of 24 bit true data, whilst kmixer truncates everything to 16 bits (Edit: not exactly true, see correction at later post). Also, it seems that under some circumstances (several simultaneous audio streams, playing of data with a sampling rate that the sound card doesn't support natively), kmixer also resamples the data, and the quality of this resampling depends on how are the sound devices properties configured.

But, if the quality of resampling is set to max., in practice there should be very little or no difference in the quality of perceived sound, and a similar thing happens with soundcard resampling. As Dibrom said, if you hear an "immediate" or obvious difference it is most probably due to you imagination, not the sound actually coming from your soundcard.

However, it seems that some resampling routines that are lower quality that SSRC make weird things with very high frequencies, according to some people's experiences it seems that this things are sometimes easy to hear playing pure high frequency tones, but very difficult to hear using real music.

Recapitulating:

In Win9x/Me systems, there is no difference in using the regular WaveOut plugin or the ASIO plugin.
In Win2K/XP systems, the ASIO plugin makes sure that you are achieving the maximum quality possible, but you are limited to your soundcard native sampling rate, unless you use SSRC too.

Edit: WinXP does not truncate to 16 bits.

Asio Output Plugin For Winamp 2 Goes Open Source

Reply #9 –
Quote
As to kmixer in Win2K/XP, ASIO allows the use of 24 bit true data, whilst kmixer truncates everything to 16 bits.

WinXP never truncated, and this issue is fixed in Win2k with SP3 update.

Asio Output Plugin For Winamp 2 Goes Open Source

Reply #10 –
Quote
Prior to finding this ASIO plugin a few days ago, I used Peter's "SSRC WaveOut plugin" configured to 16-bit 48000 and considered the sound to be near excellent (and significantly better than Peter's DirectSound SSRC plugin, for whatever reason - at least on my system). 

If Windows mixer settings for wave output and master volume are not at maximum, wave out will be somewhat louder than directsound but there won't be any other quality differences. ASIO however will bypass mixer settings and use maximum loudness always.
I hope you used maximum volume when comparing these plugins, those small volume differences can be easily observed as huge quality differences.
 

Asio Output Plugin For Winamp 2 Goes Open Source

Reply #11 –
Quote
WinXP never truncated, and this issue is fixed in Win2k with SP3 update.

Yes, I knew Win2K SP3 fixed this issues. As to WinXP, you're right, I thought it had same behaviour as Win2K. Thanks for the correction.