Recently, there has been some refactoring and bugfixing with regards to how audio rendering is done by manx (our latest developer on the team). This required some significant restructuring in the audio play/stop code and related things. Some of the main benefits are:
- Even with WaveOut devices and high latencies, "follow song" is now really smooth and truly in sync with the music, just like with ASIO!
- Live recording is now more reliable.
- Audio device is no longer closed and re-opened when switching between playback between modules (except for when "Restart module" is used, but this might be fixed later)
Some things in the sound card setup has changed. Instead of specifying a buffer size (which is
not the same thing as latency, as it's just a fraction of the latency!), you can specify a desired latency and a GUI update interval. The GUI update interval should be low, something like 5ms should work just fine on most systems.
Old buffer settings are imported automatically. For WaveOut/DirectSound, the formula is: Latency = Buffer Size / 3, Update Interval = Buffer Size / 8. For ASIO it's Latency = Buffer Size, Update Interval is ignored (since the number of ASIO buffers is fixed to 2).
And as an added bonus for users of Windows Vista and later, manx has added WASAPI support, which is useful if you don't have ASIO (might also be a nice alternative to ASIO4All).
If you notice any crashes, deadlocks or whatever, please report them here. The new experimental build is available at
http://sagagames.de/stuff/mptrack.exe
