- Joined
- May 14, 2020
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Last week I received my first “audiophile dac” with support for “Hi-Res Audio”, a SMSL M300 MKII. I knew that I had to download drivers to get some of the wackyer bitrates working correctly. Besides that I assumed it would “just work”.
So I get some sample files at various bitrates to test and the screen on the dac always says “44.1kHz”. So first I tried cranking the bitrate in windows, because hopefully upsampling lower bitrate content is better than downsampling higher bitrate content. This caused some applications to throw errors, so back to 44/16. That's when I did a little research and learned I needed to use WASAPI or asio exclusive mode, which cuts off audio for other applications.
This is already not a great user experience. I would have hoped for something more along the lines of defaulting to native content bitrate unless there are multiple apps producing sound. In that case upsample the lower bitrate content to match the higher if they are different. I suppose it is easy for me to make these sorts of suggestions without understanding any of the difficulties that go along with it. Perhaps it is impossible.
The bigger problem is that WASAPI seems to be very janky in general. I have encountered a wide array of problems with it including but not limited to:
For media players so far I have tried AIMP, Audirvarna, Foobar2000, Grove, MediaMonkey, Media Player Classic, MusicBee, Resonic Player, VLC, Windows Media Player. They all either don’t support Exclusive mode, or exhibit at least some of these undesirable behaviors.
I have not spent as much time with ASIO exclusive mode, but the problems are much the same. There are also still media players that I haven’t tried. At this point though I am assuming the only way to get this working well is to have a dedicated media PC and then switch inputs on the dac as needed.
I am curious, have y’all have encountered these issues? Does anyone even bother using exclusive mode? Could this be caused by Xmos Drivers?
I should end by saying I consider myself proficient with computers, and I know a bad time when I have one. I am not however well versed in the audio science side of things. I have not yet done any blind testing, and I don’t make any claim whatsoever that hi-res audio, or windows resampling and dithering actually matters. These are things I would hope to know in due time. To start with I Just wanted to try some fancy new files on my fancy new dac.
So I get some sample files at various bitrates to test and the screen on the dac always says “44.1kHz”. So first I tried cranking the bitrate in windows, because hopefully upsampling lower bitrate content is better than downsampling higher bitrate content. This caused some applications to throw errors, so back to 44/16. That's when I did a little research and learned I needed to use WASAPI or asio exclusive mode, which cuts off audio for other applications.
This is already not a great user experience. I would have hoped for something more along the lines of defaulting to native content bitrate unless there are multiple apps producing sound. In that case upsample the lower bitrate content to match the higher if they are different. I suppose it is easy for me to make these sorts of suggestions without understanding any of the difficulties that go along with it. Perhaps it is impossible.
The bigger problem is that WASAPI seems to be very janky in general. I have encountered a wide array of problems with it including but not limited to:
- Pausing (all) or even stopping (most) playback does not release the audio control on media players. The only way to regain control is to close the player entirely.
- Some media players use WASAPI exclusive but then just resample the audio themselves for some reason.
- Media players will sometimes not release control even when closed, forcing a reboot of the dac to regain control.
- Websites have to be refreshed in order to play audio after exclusive control is released
- Sometimes after using exclusive mode, switching playback devices in windows will no longer work. This issue requires a full system restart to fix.
- Discord will always break and requires you to manually reset the audio playback device. Discord breaks semi regularly though, so I think this could be blamed on them.
For media players so far I have tried AIMP, Audirvarna, Foobar2000, Grove, MediaMonkey, Media Player Classic, MusicBee, Resonic Player, VLC, Windows Media Player. They all either don’t support Exclusive mode, or exhibit at least some of these undesirable behaviors.
I have not spent as much time with ASIO exclusive mode, but the problems are much the same. There are also still media players that I haven’t tried. At this point though I am assuming the only way to get this working well is to have a dedicated media PC and then switch inputs on the dac as needed.
I am curious, have y’all have encountered these issues? Does anyone even bother using exclusive mode? Could this be caused by Xmos Drivers?
I should end by saying I consider myself proficient with computers, and I know a bad time when I have one. I am not however well versed in the audio science side of things. I have not yet done any blind testing, and I don’t make any claim whatsoever that hi-res audio, or windows resampling and dithering actually matters. These are things I would hope to know in due time. To start with I Just wanted to try some fancy new files on my fancy new dac.