I have a playlist feeding 2 players (in fact the default layout) and I am sending the audio from each player to a different channel on the Delta 44 card which I just installed.
After starting mAirList, if I load 2 tracks in the players and press the play on one of the tracks (doesn’t matter which) it goes through the motions of changing colour and the intro countdown timer appears over the playlist but it remains static and the audio does not play. If I then click start on the second player both start to play.
After this initial situation all subsequent ‘starts’ seem to work fine.
This appears to be a problem with the Delta drivers, or the interaction between BASS.DLL and the drivers. BASS tries to feed the audio into the sound card, but the latter does not accept it, so the BASS buffer does not get flushed and it appears that the channel playing but does not proceed. This is due to the architecture of BASS, which allows it to be in a “stalled” state, just like when playing a network stream, and no data is received for a certain amount of time.
I don’t know why the channel suddenly starts when you start a different player. Obviously, the two channels (on different speaker pairs?) interact with each other. The four outputs appear as four speaker pairs on one device (and not as four distinct devices), correct?
I would try to enabled/disable some of the BASS device options, in particular BASS_SAMPLE_FLOAT and BASS_SAMPLE_SOFTWARE. You can also try to enable “force multichannel” for the card. The default settings work well on most sound cards, but some cards need different settings in order to work correctly, especially when it comes to multichannel output.
Also make sure that you have the latest sound card drivers and DirectX update.
Thanks for the tips. I tried all your suggestions but the first audio played on the 2 players always started together.
After further investigation I have cured the problem by going into the M Audio Delta Control panel hardware settings and altering the ‘Multitrack driver devices’ setting from ‘Single and in-sync’ to ‘Independent’