Monthly Archives: December 2015

SoundPusher v1.0.0

And we have a release (which is fairly untested, but it works for me). This is first time I’ve released something post-Gatekeeper, so I hope I signed all the things correctly. Also the first time I’ve attempted an installer.

I’ve redone the synchronisation between the input and output thread about 5 times now, let’s hope this variant works out. It’s easy if you don’t care about latency, but trying to get that as low as possible without glitching and staying real-time is quite hard. By default, only AC3 encoding is enabled as DTS support in libavcodec is only experimental. EAC3 seems to distribute packets over multiple SPDIF frames, and thus seems to be a bad choice due to further increased latency.

Diablo 3 sounds quite different with 5.1 sound for example, as the different screen corners map to in front or behind your character (and thus the listener) due to the isometric perspective.

Report any issues or suggestions on the GitHub page. Happy multi-channel audio-ing! 🙂

SoundPusher

I’ve been on a bit of a coding spree during my time off work, and managed to make some progress on my old attempt to provide a virtual 5.1 sound-card that does real-time AC3 encoding to a digital output connection. This time around, I didn’t actually stop a third of the way in and it actually works (and quite well at that — at least on my system — if I may say so).

The code is on GitHub. If you’re interested helping with testing, feel free to get in touch.

For some internals, I reduced the number of components to two, as I eschewed AudioUnits (and thus the separate encoder) altogether. There’s now just the user-space LoopbackAudio driver (AudioServerPlugIn) and the SoundPusher application that reads from the loopback-driver, compresses that and then sends it to the real digital output stream. Latency is reasonable from my experiments, as is CPU usage.