There could be a million reasons for your issues, however I don't have any of them 😀

In my gaming / work / video editing machine I have a Sound Blaster Z and use the headphone surround for Battlefield 4. Works very well, although the technology doesn't process distinguishing sounds that come from above or below. Pretty sure EAX/CMSS-3D games under XP supported this.

On my capture PC I have a Sound Blaster Titanium HD and often use the "What you hear" to capture footage and audio mix from my retro gear.

DracoNihil wrote:

Specifically I recently ended up having to use alchmey for almost everything imaginable, because Windows 7 ends up chopping and skipping the audio otherwise.

And to add insult to injury if I try to record audio in my games through "What U Hear" it's all COMPLETELY distorted....

Tried googling, came up nothing... So I guess I have to install windows xp on this machine just to beable to record videos again, or is there a way to hack the stupid brain damaged windows 7 audio to have a SHORTER buffer like KMixer had?

Some audio cards input jacks are configurable to split between microphone and an unamplified input. If your card is one of these cards make sure you're not set to mic on the jack or it will amplify and probably distort. I had this issue with My Sound Blaster Z.

http://software.muzychenko.net/eng/vac.htm

Windows 7 handles audio differently (and annoyingly too i'd admit, with audiodg taking up a lot of the processes just to equalize volume dynamically in the most undesired situations)

You'll have to configure your recording device to be your stereo mix in the sound device panel and then adjust your volume for that recording to avoid distortion. It's not really the same as going in sndvol32 and muting all but "What U hear" or 'Stereo Mix" but WorksForMe(TM).

I just somehow fixed it by restarting the ENTIRE audio service... but it wasn't long before the problem came back a few hours later.

and by distortion I mean, it's like it's under running somehow. Something that can easily be fixed if the stupid audio buffering in Windows 7 was not hardcoded.

EDIT: Oh yeah what leilei just mentioned, why can you not turn off the stupid dynamic compression crap that Windows 7's audio tries to do to equalize and avoid distortion? It screws with my hearing... Another reason why I've been using ASIO4ALL and OpenAL + ALchemy for anything I can use it on.

Since you mention "What U Hear" I assume that you are using a Creative card. I used to have some of the issues you mention with my old Audigy, which I kept for easy use of SoundFonts. I fixed it by installing an unofficial driver pack since Creative had washed their hands of the issues on Win7. http://nomoregoatsoup.wordpress.com/2010/04/2 … pport-pack-3-8/

That's what I'm using... it makes no difference other than the fact Daniel K's driver seems to make ALchemy work better in almost everything on my system.

Oh yeah I remember mentioning on this forum a long time ago about a bug where if I load any kind of large sound font I get clicking when it attempts to play a instrument ONCE, and it goes away when you play it again. I'm not sure if it's this crappy OS or my card is defective.

EDIT: Also no thanks to "Hollywood" which should be burned to the ground for attacking every filesharing site that people LEGITIMATELY USE... Hotfile nolonger exists so I'm having a hard time finding Daniel K's work as a result of this... Man I hate american copyright laws and lawyers.

Maybe this will help:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2653312

I don't think this hotfix relates to anything I'm talking about... I said that it sounds like a underrun issue, infact if I look in Audacity I can see it's dropping samples. Restarting the audio service clears it up only temporarily. The sampling rate of the What U Hear is set to the native rate my X-Fi card records at.

Also if I recorded normal audio as in, not through OpenAL via What U Hear it sounds fine, but OpenAL or ASIO4ALL results in a stupid underrun stuttering mess.

Creative includes its own ASIO, it sounds logical ASIO4ALL underruns.

This is the main reason I'm still on XP. Have you also noticed that Win7 uses a very low quality resampling algorithm to convert EVERYTHING to its master sampling rate?

bloodbat wrote:

Creative includes its own ASIO, it sounds logical ASIO4ALL underruns.

Creative's ASIO doesn't work at all, even still it's nothing to do with ASIO4ALL... I'm saying Windows Audio fails at retrieving What U Hear when I'm using a ultra low latency output source. I wish there was a way to actually pull the What U Hear of my X-Fi directly rather than going through Windows Audio.

Am I really this bad at explaining things? I wonder that myself sometimes... My audio output is fine with no underrunning, skipping or popping. It's recording it from What U Hear when using either OpenAL or ASIO4ALL as a output. If I stuck with Windows Audio\DirectSound it's fine to record. Of course I'm able to fix the stupid problem by going into services.msc and restarting the entire Windows Audio Service (which shouldn't even exist, what the hell was wrong with sound being a kernel level thing?) but this only lasts for a few hours...

jwt27 wrote:

This is the main reason I'm still on XP. Have you also noticed that Win7 uses a very low quality resampling algorithm to convert EVERYTHING to its master sampling rate?

Yeah, it's why I use OpenAL for everything because my X-Fi does a better job at resampling than anything software.

interesting. i've never had any audio problems on 7 and i'v installed it and used on a TON of systems. my main machine sounds smooth and clear but, i have a Xonar D1 with unofficial drivers. (way better and more stable than supplied drivers)

is it really software and not hardware? maybe a few bad caps on the sound card or onboard audio? or am i totally talking out of my ass and need to leave?

does win 8 have the same problem as 7? does this problem occur with nice sound cards? can the sound quality in general be turned up? in know there is that one setting in control panel.

Creative's ASIO driver works fine in both Reason and with a Winamp ASIO output plug-in for me. The card in question is a X-Fi Fatality PCI Platinum Whatever. The "What-U-Hear" input seems to work fine with recording ASIO output. Note, ASIO4ALL is an "emulated" driver, it uses your WaveOut driver for output anyway. Its purpose is to give cards that don't have an ASIO driver the ability to use the interface. Only the Creative driver bypasses the internal mixer/sampler in Windows and goes directly to the hardware.

I'd suggest trying WASAPI for direct audio device access, but it depends on what Creative driver you have installed. WASAPI enabled drivers completely remove the "What-U-Hear" input and uses its internal loopback recording device.

Any more information about the machine the card is in and what bus it uses (PCI or PCIe)? Creative's hardware is notorious for weird latency issues, particularly with non-Intel chipsets.

ASIO4ALL uses "Kernel Streaming", which is why you have to have absolutely nothing else using software audio processing for it to work properly. I'm going to guess because of that it bypasses Windows' audio resampler. Also believe it or not, that actually provides the best low latency and quality compared to what the Creative ASIO driver does in OpenMPT...

I also question the claim of WASAPI being able to directly access the audio device, is it even possible of using voices on a Creative sound device? WASAPI to me sounds just like what ASIO4ALL does, kernel streaming when placed in "exclusive mode".

http://www.cambridgeaudio.com/media/audiophil … -1353493608.pdf

The answer is a clear as mud. I'm still wondering why Creative's ASIO driver isn't working for you.

Seeing how I struggle with getting drivers of any kind to work on this system, it's probably the reason why it's not working for me properly.

I figured out how to get the Creative ASIO to work in OpenMPT (I feel kind of embarrassed for not figuring this out sooner) but I'm running into oddities with it that I don't encounter using ASIO4ALL's kernel streaming method. (being limited to 96000 when I know this card can do 192000 and frequent underrunning)

Managed to reproduce the problem. Seems like its the X-Fi driver. Re-starting the Windows Audio Endpoint service usually fixes it. It is NOT an isolated KStreamer, ASIO, or buffer issue. When the problem happens, I get distorted recordings from "What-U-Hear" with even system sounds playing back.

Check this out: http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=64544

Yeah exactly, I have to restart that retarded service just to fix the problem but it's temporary... Sometimes I wish Creative would just open source their drivers so someone with a actual brain can produce something that works...