Using Cantabile and Playing Music Simultaneously

[omatase]

I am having a hard time getting Cantabile to play well with my soundcard driver. I use cantabile as a virtual amp for my guitar. It works great outputting sound to my speakers. I'm using the FA36_Full VST plugin by Fretted Synth for the amp simulation.

The problem I'm having is once Cantabile is open I can no longer output any audio from any other application. I don't know where the problem lies here, it could, for all I know, be Windows or the sound card driver but I would very much like to find a way to have Cantabile open and performing as a virtual amp for me at the same time I'm running sound tracks from other programs (I use Guitar Pro 9 to display my sheet music and playback backing tracks as I play).

I had this problem with another laptop that had a pretty crappy soundcard in it as well. At the time I thought it was a problem with the soundcard in that laptop. I just got a brand new laptop. It's a "gaming laptop" by ASUS (g53sw-xn1). It has phenomenal features: core i7, NVIDIA gtx460M video card, 1080p display and digital and analog audio out. I'm thinking there has to be a way I can get this sound card to allow more than one application to send audio through it at a time but I cannot find any good information about the model of soundcard in the laptop. siw just reports it as "NVIDIA High Definition Audio Device", dxdiag provides even less information.

Can someone help me understand how I can play audio out through cantabile at the same time I'm playing audio in another application over the same audio output jack? My friend and I get together to play each week and he's using a macbook pro with Garage Band (as his virtual amp) + Guitar Pro 9 and he has no problem with both applications sending audio out over a single output.

As a second question, the cantabile help file recommends using ASIO4ALL as a replacement driver for soundcards when there is sound lag. I have this installed and working on my new laptop but the help file also mentions that some sound cards have ASIO drivers available for them. How do I know if my sound card has an ASIO driver available?

Thanks!

[humphrey]

Hi,

I think what you need are WDM-drivers for your soundcard. I know well about the need having two applications sending audio streams to the same soundcard.

In my case this works flawlessly on my desktop (RME-Hammerfall DSP System) and my laptop (Echo Indigo DJx). But in both cases I use the WDM-drivers which are fortunately available for both cards.

As both cards have virtual channels available I'm able to root the sources to different virtual channels, adjust the level for each and sum them to one audio out.

I also use my onboard card (laptop) with ASIO4ALL driver which really works fine, but here I have no possibility to use a daw and another application in parallel.

In your case I see two general possibilities:

1) look I there are WDM drivers available for your onboard card
2) get an external audio-interface which has such drivers available

One last aspect: If you only want to replay audio-files like mp3 or wav (f.e. to play your guitar to a playback) there is a small audio-player already implemented in cantabile. For many format this really works without problems. In this case ASIO drivers or ASIO4ALL is sufficient, as the mixing is done inside cantabile.

regards, humphrey