VST for Windows 7 System Audio?

[von.ah]

I was of course overzealous.

I had some problems with VAC as well. I couldn't get the synchronization right between the PC and the hardware squeezebox, and there were occasional glitches where the sound was flawed.

I may try it again sometime, but it's just too time consuming to play with. I will be trying passive very-high-crossed tweeters next.

[von.ah]

Holy crap, I just got it to work, and beautifully!
After hours of wrestling with Jack Audio, Savihost, Electri-Q, and Squeezeslave options, I correctly got all parties using the right ASIO drivers. Now I can EQ my synchronized software player! Yay me!
And this is all with FREE SOFTWARE. Amazing.
I'm going to be tired at work tomorrow.

[boris81]

Beautiful!
I want to try something similar and this gives me hope.

[phofman]

Originally Posted by von.ah

After hours of wrestling with Jack Audio

Good to know the world of jack is viable for windows users.

[Billyo]

Originally Posted by von.ah

Holy crap, I just got it to work, and beautifully!
After hours of wrestling with Jack Audio, Savihost, Electri-Q, and Squeezeslave options, I correctly got all parties using the right ASIO drivers. Now I can EQ my synchronized software player! Yay me!
And this is all with FREE SOFTWARE. Amazing.
I'm going to be tired at work tomorrow.

Well done - I've toyed with vst plugins myself and found them near impossible to work properly.

I've never managed to achieve what you did - i.e. process all sound leaving my HTPC with a VST plugin - regardless of what player was generating the sound.

what hosts and plugins did you end up using?

[von.ah]

My recollection will be a bit fuzzy here as I'm no longer using JackAudio due to its overall complexity. I've since stopped using it because this method uses multiple running applications all the time, and the PC I was using is the main home PC for everyone to use. Plus just starting up the music with all the required steps and configurations was more than anyone else would be able to deal with. Plus plus, I could not get Jack to work at all with HOLM Impulse, so I gave up software EQ-ing.

Once I'm back home for the weekend I may add some detail if I miss something.

The first hurdle I had difficulty with was getting JackAudio to work with other applications in Win7 at all.

The critical issue is that all music applications must be operating through the same ASIO driver for Jack to work. I downloaded and installed the right driver for my USB DAC from behringer.
Once you install the Jack windows client (I now forget if I used the 64 or 32-bit version, and from where I got it), the music clients need to be set up to communicate with each other.
I used SAVIHost without much issue. It's pretty easy and the directions from its website are pretty good. It just runs the VST you want just like you would expect the VST to run. I had prior experience with ElectriQ with foobar on my work PC, so I used that.
Also, since I use Squeezeserver at home, I needed the right options for the software Squeezebox-mimic to get it to communicate with Jack properly (had to write a batch file to run the player with ASIO output -- something like foobar is so much easier).

So, If you're not confused enough yet, here is the order of operations I would go through to utilize Jack to manipulate the music coming out of my PC.

1. Start Jack PortAudio
2. Start Squeezeslave music player
3. Start VST plugin through SAVIHost
4. Start JackAudio Connection Kit
5. Click on 'Connect' in the Connection Kit to set the connections between available running programs (as in my picture above)

One item to remember is that there has to be an active signal 'playing' for Jack to allow the connections to be made.

If I got as far as music playing, I could manipulate the VST plugin to see if I got a response. After a lot of fooling, I finally was able to manipulate the sound emanating from the speakers with the EQ plugin. After being satisfied that all things are go, you can close the Connection Kit program to eliminate one extra process going on.

All of this can become infinitely more complicated depending on what you want to do with your HTPCs sound output. All my music is in redbook CD resolution, so I had 16 bit, 44.1k sample rate set for everything, with a lot of the software defaults engaged. And I only ran one music player and one VST plugin.

On that note, this has been my longest post EVER on DIYAudio. You're welcome.
Good luck!

[natehansen66]

J River Media Center can host VST plugins, has a pretty impressive DSP engine, and has a loopback feature. The loopback does what Jack does without the complex setup. It can be used with any measurement software to see the results of eq applied from the same PC.

I'm using it right now, listening to Spotify routed through JR as a digital crossover and eq. It nearly has me convinced to get rid of my miniDSP's and go 100% PC

[geraldfryjr]

I use Live Professor.
It works great so far.
I tried several others but I couldn't get them to work, so I just stuck with Live Professor as it worked flawlessly the first time around with my GINA24 card.

If you don't have an ASIO driver you can use ASIO4ALL, it works too with every sound card that I have tried.

Foobar does it too but I haven't messed with it much.

In liveProfessor you just need to load a sample player and load your sound file into that,I have had as many as 8 effects going somtimes before the DSP load starts to get to high for my Opteron 185 running at 2.95 Ghz.
It even does well on my older P4's too.

Winamp has a plugin capability as well but it is quite limited and bogs down and skips sometimes.


FWIW.

jer

[SoNic_real_one]

True, Foobar2000 has a free plug-in for VST.
Of course, it needs the ASIO plugin too.

[Billyo]

Originally Posted by von.ah

On that note, this has been my longest post EVER on DIYAudio. You're welcome.
Good luck!

Hey, and I appreciate it!

Wow, and after beating my head against a wall with these darn VST things and reading the pain of your experience, I think I'll look for a different way!

That Live Professor software looks interesting, but does it do what I want: i.e. take audio from any player and process it through a VST plug in before leaving the PC? I'd love to be able to use some of the great looking parametric equalizers that VST plug ins do - but only seem to exist for line IN.