Old 09-12-2006, 08:18 AM   #1
Twinsen
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Default Hardware effects of DSP processor

I use Reaper with Creative X-Fi soundcard. How can I use hardware effects of this card in Reaper? I think it might be very useful in some cases
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Old 09-15-2006, 03:23 PM   #2
Spon
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Here's an only slightly puffy summary of what the card can do.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/08/18/creative_x/

It looks like the mode with 5 ASIO channel pairs might let you get access to the card's effects, but it might not. It's hard to tell without experimenting. If it worked, you'd have two reverbs of fairly good quality you could patch into a mix, in REAPER or another DAW. I'm not sure what the other effects are, but they seem to really underutilize the DSP, like previous SoundBlasters with DSP. Aside from that, you can dump a part, or a whole mix, through the card, add effects, and re-record the part. If you're lucky, you can do it all in the soundcard, else you might have to have a digital patchcord, or two soundcards.

I'm running an SBLive with the kx driver, which is a third-party project to get access to the DSP and other features of a similar but older card. Without this driver, the card did nothing with its DSP but multichannel decoding. It may as well have not been there.

Likewise, although it had two good quality soundfont synths, with the stock driver there was no way to do anything useful with them except the analog "record what u hear". The kx driver allows me to patch them, by channel, to various ASIO outputs, and thence to REAPER.

The X-fi is a different architecture than the Live series, and the kx project will not be supporting it ever.

Good luck, and RTFM.
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Old 09-15-2006, 11:48 PM   #3
Art Evans
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To refer to the Audigy as "the standard for sound cards until now" in that review is a somewhat over the top in respect of cards running internally at a fixed 48kHz, IMHO. It's far from clear from the review whether or not this is still the case - all those references to sample rate conversion make one wonder.
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Old 09-16-2006, 09:54 AM   #4
Spon
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Removing the SR limitation is the main improvement in the X-fi over the Audigy as far as audiots are concerned

I did say "puffy". You expect a FAIR review of a SoundBlaster? They'd never see a free sample again!

It's still not a pro card, and they don't sell it that way. I mean, what is an Xtreme MP3 listener, anyway?

They claim better specs, nearly competitive, and drool over their new SR converter - compare their graph with the DAW mixer ones we were looking at earlier - but I wouldn't believe them until I saw them out of calibrated test instruments, and then I'd only believe them in THAT computer in THAT room.

Unfortunately removing the SR limitation means a different DSP, which made it incompatible with the kx driver, which, buggy and incomplete though it is, is the only way to access the cards the way a professional would like to.

So yeah, for your trouble you get two reverbs of indeterminate quality, and a soundfont synth or two. But he already has the card, and it's two more reverbs and synths for free.

Aside from all that, if you CAN use the DSP for music, it's a big improvement over previous Creative cards.

Last edited by Spon; 09-16-2006 at 09:55 AM. Reason: dept. of redundancy dept.
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Old 09-21-2006, 03:38 AM   #5
Twinsen
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Spon, thank you for so good answer. Any chances to see kx driver or other driver of same kind for X-Fi in the future, how do you think?

About soundfonts - if soundfonts stored in RAM of my PC, where's the difference between X-Fi and any other card in soundfonts using? DSP have some soundfonts processing power? Soundfonts need any resourses except memory?
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Old 09-21-2006, 12:53 PM   #6
Spon
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Twinsen
Spon, thank you for so good answer. Any chances to see kx driver or other driver of same kind for X-Fi in the future, how do you think?

About soundfonts - if soundfonts stored in RAM of my PC, where's the difference between X-Fi and any other card in soundfonts using? DSP have some soundfonts processing power? Soundfonts need any resourses except memory?
KX for X-fi - as far as I know, no chance. The KX project is based on low-level work with the DSP chips (Emu 10K1 and 10K2) used in the supported cards. Any card with different hardware - out of the question.

As to whether someone else will - as far as I can tell from kx, Creative is not very helpful or cooperative, and I don't know that there's much demand. It's a big job, and there are so MANY Live! cards out there... No one is stopping you

Soundcards USED to have to have their own special RAM on the card, not usable for anything else. Soundfonts had to fit into this RAM. I don't know how many cards still do this, but the SBLive! made a big deal of using Windows memory instead.

If the card/soundfont uses Windows memory, the only limit on size is your system memory - this means people can (and do) make gigabyte-sized soundfonts.

Soundfont support is extrememly variable. I don't know of anything that supports all the possible soundfont features. But I don't know any soundfonts that use them all, either.

On my soundcard, the DSP necessary for soundfonts is done on the card. But that also means it's completely inflexible.

If I play them in SFZ or Awave, the filters, for example, have to be simulated in software - that costs CPU. So the CPU drain can depend on just what features the actual voice uses. On the other hand, in SFZ I can adjust how much CPU is used - low power for draft, and clean it up to render, AND they can upgrade their filters with new versions.

So, if you can patch your soundcard's synths back into REAPER, they will play with less CPU than if you played them in a plugin. They still use up system memory, but even a 32MB soundfont is small compared to modern machines' memory. And the synths on the soundcard have very low latency. At least mine do - independent of the DAW.
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Old 09-28-2006, 06:37 AM   #7
Twinsen
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Thank you very-very much, great info!
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