Front & rear outs on SBLive stopped working

[canada-paul]

I've got Sonar 2.0XL, and up until yesterday, besides one BSOD, it's been pretty stable. Then half way through messing with a song, I put on my headphones, and the sound was just a barely recognizable, garbled, static-filled version of the original. The headphones are connected to my mixer, into which is plugged the SBLive "rear out". The inferior "front out" is plugged into my home stereo, just so I can demo what I've been working on for others rather than have them wear the headphones. I'm positive that I've had both the fronts and rears (so, sound going into mixer and into stereo) working at the same time before. I've also made sure that the Creative Audio HQ shows that it's in 4-speaker mode.

I loaded up previous projects, and again, they too sounded like crap. The only thing that seemed to work properly was straight ahead MIDI data, through the SBLive synth. Anything that went through a soundfont, Edirol, or as audio data either didn't play at all or sounded completely garbled.

I reinstalled Sonar and the SBLive drivers, which seemed to fix the garbled, distorted mess, but I still cannot hear the song through both outputs at the same time. They are both selected as active drivers in the Audio menu. I know both outputs are still capable of running at the same time, because if I play just a plain old mp3 through Winamp I get a good clean, loud signal through both the mixer and the stereo.

Anyone run into a sudden problem like this?

Here's a screen shot of my audio options to show that both the front and rear speakers (1/2 and 5/6) are enabled.

 

[James Argo]

What about the Out 3/4 ?

Just a tips, be very carefull playing with creative's driver. Sometime it gives you bad time tweaking the purpose of each routes & real capability...

Anyway, what OS ?


Jaymz

 

[canada-paul]

James, I left 3/4 off because I believe it represents the center and bass channels of a 5.1 system. My SBLive is not the 5.1 version, so when you select 5.1 in the Creative AudioHQ, I think it directs a full left pan on 3/4 to the front output. As you pan 3/4 more towards the right, the signal disappears, which I'm guessing is because its trying to send it to a subwoofer output, which isn't present on my card.

I have tried it with all 3 drivers enabled, both 1/2 and 5/6 enabled (as you see from the pic), and also 1/2 and 5/6 separately. The run down is like this:

Driver combination enabled:
1/2: Front output works only
3/4: Full left-pan sends full signal to front output
5/6: Rear output works only
1/2 & 5/6: Front output works only
1/2 & 3/4 & 5/6: Front output works only

The system I'm running on:

Win2K with Service Pack 3
P4 1.5GHz
SiS 645 motherboard
256 MB DDR RAM
2 40gig, ATA133 HDs
SBLive

P.S. Something else I forgot to mention which is pretty strange. Whenever I open any projects recently, all the sounds generated through the Edirol VSC sound 2 full octaves above their recorded values. To fix this, I have to go in and out of the Options/Audio menu. Very strange.

 

[Porter]

Have you re-run Wave Profiler?

I'm assuming you would be using WDM drivers?

Porter

 

[canada-paul]

Have you re-run Wave Profiler?

I'm assuming you would be using WDM drivers?

Porter

Yep and yep!

To save drive space, and for the reason that I'm only trying out ideas at the current time, I've dumbed the audio down to 11kHz (16-bit of course).

 

[James Argo]

in Options --> Audio --> Advanced tab, what driver mode do you use ?

I'm not sure either, but I heard somewhere that older Directsound (MME-16 bit) driver is limiting the output to two channels only. I might be wrong anyway. Have you tried another mode? (WDM, MME 32)

 

[canada-paul]

in Options --> Audio --> Advanced tab, what driver mode do you use ?

I'm not sure either, but I heard somewhere that older Directsound (MME-16 bit) driver is limiting the output to two channels only. I might be wrong anyway. Have you tried another mode? (WDM, MME 32)

I'm using the standard WDM drivers.

I could have sworn that previously, both the SBLive front and rear outputs were working simultaneously in Sonar, as they still do in things like Winamp. If I never figure out the problem, not all is lost. I can still record and work on projects, but all monitoring must then be done by headphones and not through the speakers (a big no no, I'm sure). Whats got me equally confused is this strange 2 octave jump in all the MIDI sounds when I first load the project.

 

[James Argo]

Options --> Global --> General tabs

Look for base octave for pitches It should be 0 (zero) by default

 

[canada-paul]

Options --> Global --> General tabs

Look for base octave for pitches It should be 0 (zero) by default

Yeah it is set at zero. The problem goes away as soon as I open and close the Options/Audio window. I even went into the Options menu and opened every other window I could find, and they didn't have any effect. Only when I opened up the Audio window, then closed it, did my MIDI return to its normal sound.

This has never happened before, but is consistent now. The only thing I've done differently than before is dumb the audio down to 11k and started using the Edirol VSC (much easier to share bundle files/ideas with others using this DXi than using external soundfonts).