AlexScherr

I posted this over at the bug forum, but thought I'd try it here as well: I know that others have posted and gotten answers to this kind of problem; but no one seems to know the solution.

I have a problem with sound with the newest KX drivers (3534b) and an Audigy 1 card. I get no sound from the headphones at all. I usually have them plugged into the "Line Out" jack on the Audigy card. Under the regular, most recent Audigy drivers they work fine in this position; I get both WAV playback and CD sound. So it's not a hardware connection problem.

My system specs:

1.2 Mhz Athlon
640 MB RAM
Audigy Sound Card with Midi through gameport.
DirectX 9 (beta)


Starting with the default KX install, I have tried what the FAQ on the KX site suggests: enabling and disabling the front / rear toggle in the Master panel of KX Mixer; and I've tried that for each of the "Out" jacks on the Audigy, including Line Out, Rear Out and Analog / Digital Out. In none of these (six) configurations do I get either WAV playback or CD sound; each of these works fine under the normal Audigy drivers.

I've also tried these six configurations for each of the drivers listed in the Windows Multimedia Properties Audio menus for Sound Playback, including: kX Wave SB0090 10k2 (eea0) 0/1; same, 4/5; same, 6/7; and same, 8/9. FWIW, I've also made sure that under the advanced properties for Sound Playback, I've set: Hardware acceleration to maximum; sound quality to best; and that the speaker setting is set to Heaphone. I've also randomly varied each of these settings, without luck.

FWIW, I do get excellent MIDI communication with the MIDI instrument I've got connected to the Audigy's gameport. In fact, the MIDI connection works much better than Audigy's old drivers.

I know that this is a newbie's problem, and I apologize if it's been asked before; but I can't seem to find a message on this forum which helps. I've noted some messages that suggest that rerouting using the kX DSP interface will help: but I have to admit that I'm not technically savvy enough to understand how to use this interface with confidence; I can't even figure out which boxes and which lines relate to the jacks that I'm using for headphones, and don't really understand how the boxes and lines interrelate.

I'm trying the KX drivers primarily for their improvements to MIDI and for my anticipated use of Cakewalk Sonar, especially . But it's a problem not to be able to use the heaphones for regular WAV and CD playback. Please let me know whether you know of a solution to this problem. Thank you in advance,


Alex

PS-Important: in fiddling with the parameters one more time, I kept the kX Mixer on screen (together with the Windows master mixer) while trying to play a CD through my CD player. Every time, I clicked the start button, the master volume in both Kx Mixer and Windows master mixer reset to zero volume. Putting the volume back up while the CD was playing didn't make a difference; and when I clicked stop, the master volume slider reset to zero.

This resetting phenemonen does not happen when I play a simple WAV file, but I still get no sound.

PPS-I also recall that, during installation, I got an error message saying that the setup program couldn't properly configure the MM devices, although I didn't make an exact note of the error message. When I rebooted (as the setup program suggested) I didn't get that message. If necessary, I can uninstall, reinstall the kX drivers and look for the same message.

AlexScherr

Just to add to this post:

1) here are the specs from the info screen:

----Hardware / Software configuration---------------
Driver Name:kX Audio Driver (Debug)
Driver Date: Aug 2 2003 22:07:58
Driver Version: 5.10.00.3534 - debug
DB Name:LiveBay1
SB0090 10k2 [eea0]
PCI Information:
Device: 41102 Subsys: 511102 ChipRev: 3
Card is '10k2'
Card has MPU device
Card model is '5.1'
Card HAS AC97 codec
Codec name: TriTech TR A5/CT1297 TAT
3D Extension: No 3D Stereo Enhancement
Codec is 1.0 compliant
Capabilities[0] :
DAC resolutions : -16-bit-
ADC resolutions : -16-bit-
Ext Capabilities [0]:
Port: eea0 Irq: 12
Playback buffer: 20a0
Record buffer: 4000
Number of AC3 buffers: 4
Tank memory: 256 kb
GSIF buffer: 256 samples
OS version: [1 4 90 ; 1 4 90 ; 156 148]
----------------------------------------------------

2) I tried one trick suggested on the forum, which was to disable kX Mixer in the startup folder, so that my machine booted. That worked: at least I got some sound. But when when I loaded kX Mixer, the same auto-muting behavior happened. It seems kludgy to do that: I should be able to use the software without having an impact on my card's capacity.

Thanks again for anyone who can help,

Alex

AlexScherr

OK, while I'm waiting for something helpful to come up on this board, I've continued to tweak with kxMixer and the help file. I don't know what did it, but I'm now able to get sound from the CD player, with the kxmixer loaded. When it's on, I can adjust and tweak, and it work pretty well.

However, I'm still having that "auto-muting" behavior. Whenever I play a CD, the volume control is set to zero. I have to move the slider to the right to get it to sound at all. As soon as I press stop, the control goes back to zero, and I get no sound. If I have the KxMixer on screen, set to the master tab, I notice that the master volume control does the same thing: stop the CD player and it resets to zero; start the CD player and it doesn't go to max, I have to do it manually.

For what it's worth, when playing Wav files, I don't get the same behavior: I'm hearing just fine right now, and it'll play without having to adjust volume at all.

Any ideas? It appears that, for the time being, I've localized the automuting problem to CD playing. I'll have to wait and see how Sonic handles the setup I've got now.

Thanks again for any help you might have,

Alex

AlexScherr

OK: having not heard anything, I just kept fiddling, to the point where I messed everything up terribly: couldn't get MIDI coming in, still had the volume reset problem, so on, and so on. So I uninstalled the kXdrivers and let it sit overnight.

Tonight, I reinstalled. After the first reboot, I watched the dialogs more closely, and eventually got one that said that it couldn't initialize devices or WinMM, and advised that I reinstall the drivers. I did so again, right away. At the next reboot, everything went smoothly. After testing MIDI first (in and out both working), I tried the CD player: same problem. Tried a WAV player: same problem.

Then I rebooted without kxdriver in the startup folder. Everything worked beautfiully (MIDI, Wav, CD). When I activated the driver, all I had to do was to uncheck the "front / rear" option, and I got good sound, and Midi still worked. (I suspect that, if I had uncehcked the "front/rear" option before disabling the driver in startup, I could have skipped that step.) But I still had the volume reset problem.

Then I tried a different CD player software. I couldn't (still can't) get Winamp to work, so I tried the Windows Media Player: BINGO! everything's fine. That's when I realized that I had been usihg the Creative PlayCenter to play CD's; it's the player that has been resetting the volume, not the driver.

So now I'm fine. I'm posting to let others who might have this same problem see what worked for me. The part that (still) looks like a bug to me is the installation part: that dialog box that I got should be mentioned in the installation FAQ on the kx main page, and you should stress that, as soon as the user gets that message, they should reinstall right away.

That's it. I'm glad I can use what look to be very good drivers.

Alex