PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

I'm having great difficulty w/SFP and Shoutcast on my 2 card system on a D865Perl/3GHz system (1Pulsar & 1 Scope Pro). As soon as I even attempt to load the DSP feature of Shoutcast into Winamp I get a total system crash into reboot mode. Even w/o Shoutcast, in Second Life, I get crackles in the audio with the highest wav buffer setting and 13ms ULLI. For grins, I disabled Scope and enabled my onboard audio for the first time ever, and Shoutcast works fine and no crackles in Second Life.

I'm trying to get this all working so I can broadcast live with some SFP fx but I'm at a total standstill. I even borrowed a friend's 7800GS video card - no diff - well, except the environment in SL was way cooler and Doom 3 much scarier! It's the hard crash/reboot that freaks me out. WTF over?

Have you tried it with vlc media player ?

He's trying to be the source of the stream (Be A Dj on the shoutcast page) which uses a dll that winamp routes incoming signals to, rather than just listen to shoutcasts.


First off, how the shoutcast plugin works depends on which version you use, but they all 'see' the audio input that you set as the Windows default recording input, in your Sounds & Audio Devices control panel under the 'Audio' tab. You probably figured this out already but though I'd be explicit.

Secondly, what version of Scope are you running? I have better luck with the 4.x drivers (some even say the 4.5 driver). You don't have to pay anything to use the upgraded Scope versions, you just don't get the additional plugin bundles.

Now, you say with the 'highest' buffer setting, do you mean the 'Output Preload' slider? I have found this helps shoutcast a great deal (3/4 of the way to the right was good for me). Even with the Output Preload slider turned up I'd probably go a bit higher than 13ms ULLI if I was having problems with using the WAV driver. If you haven't played with the Output Preload slider then I highly recommend you do, as this generally solves most issues with the WAV drivers in Scope.

And of course make sure you have a copy of the LAME dll if you're using that as your encoder source.

In regards to 2nd Life, I happen to have an old SBlive in my system for games & general 'windows' crap (better than AC97 onboard audio as that consumes a ton of cpu). I use the KX Project drivers with it, as they allow a great degree of flexibility for a card that can be found for $10 these days. The only real drawback to these cards (for non-audio work) is that all sound passing through them is resampled from whatever samplerate the source is (typically 44.1khz) to 48khz, as there is only a single clockrate in the cards. I find that longterm listening of music through this thing is very fatigueing, while my RME & SCope cards are not. But for a 30 min UT session it works great.

An interesting side note, as of my most recent XP reinstall if I attempt to use the SBLive as a Mic input in my games I get a total system freeze. NO bsod, no anything. And nothing has changed slots inside the PC at all, the only difference is that XP's ACPI support has reshuffled everything. It definately worked before, but now I use a different recording input with a Shure hanging from a boom, which is overkill for a game.

You can be the source with VLC as well.No I haven't tried it.

That's actually true, I didn't mean to sound like I was shutting you down. It's just that it is more complicated and I suspect his problem with crackles isn't specific to winamp but rather his Scope settings. Also the default output for VLC is ogg, and configuring it requires a bit of a pain or installing additional stuff. Cheers for the info though

hey cool I can save the streams to disk fine with VLC!

Winamp get really good quality shoutcasts, honestly, who needs tv with all the shoutcasts available.

So I disabled USB, set the Output Preload all the way up, spoke w/Ali who said the driver I'm using from 3.1c is the same driver in the latest ver, and still, static everywhere in Second Life just listening to a live performance w/Scope wav to Scope Analog dest only in a minimized project. The D865PERL onboard audio is however flawless and works with both winamp/shoutcast and just listening to the stream. One of my 2 cards is on IRQ 18, the other on 19 (which shares LAN). Both 18/19 run USB hubs. Disabling USB made absolutely no diff. I'm ALMOST ready to ditch HT and reinstall as Standard PC. Damn I wish IRQs were assignable in ACPI. I will swap card positions and see if that makes any diff. Next I will do a fresh, minimal new OS install on a new drive to test. This sux. Anyone else with my mb able to stream with Scope in Second Life?

Running HT, that does complicate things a bit, especially trying to run audio & a 3d application. I don't think hard-locking IRQ's is the source of the issue here, nor do I think that USB would cause these issues unless you were using a high bandwidth usb2 device (harddrive, another audio card, graphics card!!, etc).

One thing you might try is Doubledawg: http://www.mark-knutson.com/t3/dawguse.html

Since I use my system for graphics and audio (not usually both at the same time) I change the pci latency for my graphics card for each task. You might want to try turning the PCI latency of your graphics card down to 128 and see if it helps.

Also try different latencies for your ULLI setting. Output preload seems to work in conjunction with the ULLI. Although the documentation is a little unclear how, usually most WAV driver apps have a 'buffer size' and a 'number of buffers' (ULLI being the buffer size). They will work on conjunction.

I don' t know how streaming works in second life, are you just connecting to a shoutcast server as you would for any other application? If so and if tweaking doesn't help your problems, you might use shoutcast on a separate system from your scope cards.

If you don't already own something, you can pick up something inexpensive with a proper digital input and try using that (get it from a shop with a return policy that agrees with you). Read up on it before you buy it, the downside to SPDIF is that most cheaper devices have to be the master (they have no way to slave to spdif), so if you look for a solution like this make sure that the other device supports being set as slave to Scope (unless it has a better clock, which is unlikely in budget gear).