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In Reply to: Patching the ASIO (Re: DirectX plug in in Foobar or Winamp) posted by Jim F. on December 25, 2006 at 19:41:31:
You know, re-reading the above, it occurs to me that it
might be at least worth a try, attempting to get Bobcat DX
working from within Foobar. If it worked, it would have
the enormous benefit of avoiding all the complexity of
patching ASIO between two applications (Foobar and a
DirectX host such as WaveLab) via a sound card console
app such as PatchMix DSP. You could just use ASIO or
Kernel Streaming (or ASIO4ALL, for that matter) from Foobar out
to the sound card without having to worry much about
figuring out the sound card's own console. It's just
worth remembering, before shelling out $500, that
it might not work, and you might have to fall back
on a "real" DirectX host like WaveLab.Here's what you'd have to do. First of all, you'd
get the Foobar-to-Winamp adapter foo_dsp_winamp
( http://pelit.koillismaa.fi/plugins/show.php?id=149 ).
This is only for Foobar 0.9, not the earlier
versions. Second, the preferred DirectX adapter
for Winamp seems not to be Adapt-X
( http://www.winamp.com/plugins/details.php?id=138579 )
but rather FFX-4 for Winamp
( http://perso.orange.fr/vb-audio/us/products/dxrack/dxrack.htm ).
Note -- I haven't used FFX-4 for Winamp, but I have used
both the FFX-4 VST host to DirectX plugin adapter and
the FFX-4 DirectX host to DirectX plugin adapter
contained in the FFX-4 DX-VST package, under WaveLab 5,
and they both seem to work fine (in fact, I'm
damned lucky to have found them -- see below).You'd also want to download Mega-Nerd's SRC for
Foobar 9, foo_dsp_src9.zip, from
http://www.mega-nerd.com/SRC/fb2k.html
(it's interesting that this is available again,
at least for Foobar 9, after the Foobar 8 version
was shouted off the Web by SRC's author).You probably also want to grab the ASIO plugin that
works with Foobar 9 (requires 0.9.3 or later) from
http://www.foobar2000.org/components/index.html
(BTW, all the earlier ASIO plugins are available
at http://personales.ya.com/angel49/foobar2000_otachan/ ).Unfortunately, some stuff that was available in Foobar 8,
like the diskwriter component (and it's "record://"
capability from a sound card's analog or digital line
input), are missing from Foobar 9.Then you shell out $500 for Bobcat DX, try it, and
hope for the best.BTW, you may have guessed that I myself bought Bobcat DX
this weekend. Here's my experience with it so far.
First of all, the credit-card validation, download,
and e-mailing of serial number was automatic and
practically instantaneous, even on a holiday weekend
(I was expecting to have to wait days for the serial
number). There is, in addition, an activation procedure,
similar to Windows XP's activation, whereby you
launch an activation app that gathers identifying
info about your computer and sends it to Burwen's
Web site in exchange for a secret key. Good luck if
you want to move the software to a new machine in
the future -- I don't even know if this possibility
is granted by the license (in constrast to Microsoft's
policy with respect to Windows XP, which is in
fact rather liberal, as I found out recently after
porting my Windows XP to a completely new machine --
reactivation was automatic and didn't even require the
phone call I was expecting to have to make to
Microsoft).Anyway, after installing Bobcat DX, it was there
automatically in the list of DirectX effects plugins
in WaveLab 5. I put WaveLab into Live Input mode
(which lets you monitor with all active effects in
the signal path) and added Bobcat to WaveLab's effects
rack. Boom, the Bobcat screen came up with all 18
presets. But the audio from WaveLab to ASIO OUT 1/2
in PatchMix also disappeared. This is supposed to be
what happens when you try to run Bobcat without
activation. So I tried running Bobcat's activation
app once again (two or three more times again, in
fact), and each time the activation process claimed
it had succeeded, and each time the audio would
go away every time I activated Bobcat under WaveLab.
Finally I gave up and sent an e-mail to Burwen
with my "site code" and serial number asking for the
secret key to be sent manually (which is the activation
option of last resort). Whether this will fix the
problem I do not know, and in any case this **will**
take days.However, in the meantime, in lieu of something better
to do, I tried installing FFX-4 under WaveLab, and
then Bobcat DX under FFX-4. Lo and behold, Bobcat came
up, but with a totally black screen (except for the
Bypass and Mute buttons at the top). But the **audio**
stayed on. And I could tell from the sound that the
Bobcat processing was happening. So here's how I have
to run Bobcat on my machine, at least at the moment --
first I bring it up directly in WaveLab and choose a
setting on the (visible) screen. Then I have to exit
WaveLab (once Bobcat turns off the audio, it stays
turned off), restart WaveLab, select FFX-4 as a WaveLab
effect, and then bring up Bobcat under
FFX-4 (either the VST-to-DirectX version of FFX-4 or
the DirectX-to-DirectX version of FFX-4 -- they both
work the same). Now I have a black Bobcat screen,
but I get sound. I **think** I'm getting the Bobcat
setting I picked when I didn't have sound, because
Bobcat seems to remember the setting you picked
last time when it comes up again. Heck, if my problem
with Bobcat DX **is** an activation problem, then
I may have inadvertently found a (cumbersome, but
workable) method of bypassing the activation requirement!
Or it could be an incompatibility between Bobcat DX
and WaveLab 5. (I do have the WaveLab 6 upgrade -- together
with USB dongle [or as they call it, "license control device"
:-( ), but I haven't installed it yet. I'll wait and
see what Burwen says.
Follow Ups:
... BTW, what Bobcat does to make itself visible
to WaveLab 5.When you install FFX-4, one "VB_ffx4.dll" goes in
C:\Program Files\Steinberg\VstPlugins. This is the
VST-host version of FFX-4, presumably. Another
"VB_ffx4.dll", together with "ffx4condx.ctx", go
into C:\Program Files\Steinberg\WaveLab\System\plugins.
The latter constitute the DirectX-host version of
FFX-4, presumably.I do not see where Bobcat goes. There are, of course,
some dlls in C:\Program Files\Burwen Technology\BURWEN BOBCAT DX.
I suppose the link between WaveLab and Bobcat is made
in the registry, somehow.But this might make it problematic to get Foobar to "see"
Bobcat DX, even if the bridge adapters (foo_dsp_winamp and
FFX4 for Winamp) might otherwise work properly. I suppose you'd
identify whatever looked like a candidate dll from
the BOBCAT DX and copy it to wherever FFX4 for Winamp
expects to find its plugins. Then you hope the licensing/
activation of Bobcat works from there (maybe you'd have
to copy the CRP*.dll and CRY*.dll from the Bobcat directory,
too. Who knows?)
Jim F, my odds of getting that to work would be approximately zero!Since you did manage to get it running (albeit in a limited subset of it's processing modes), how did it sound?
> Since you did manage to get it running (albeit in a limited
> subset of it's processing modes), how did it sound?Smooth, yet detailed. Extremely easy on the ears.
I too am a fan of SRC, so I plan in the near future to
cobble together a **second** high-performance PC and
run Foobar/SRC to 24/192 on that. I'll be using the
"record://" trick in Foobar 0.8.3 to get the output
of the Bobcat PC, and using Foobar on the second PC as
a "bridge" between an X-Fi at 44.1 kHz and an E-MU 1212M at
192 kHz. Then ADAT out to an Apogee Big Ben and
192 kHz S/PDIF coax to one of my 24/192 DACs. I've
tried the "bridge" experiment already and it works fine
(after a few hours of hair-pulling over the X-Fi's console
settings).No, this stuff isn't especially easy to set up. But
that's why Google was invented (it would've been
utterly impossible for a "civilian" to attempt this
kind of thing in the pre-Google era, unless he was
extraordinarly well-connected).
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