Ecasound DSP startup difficulties

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Volume control

A point of attention with this solution is the volume control. When I develop a multichannel system with this approach I will play my music by using MPD or Spotifyd (I don't own a volume controlled player for line in). Both have an option to control the music by using hardware or software controls. My Xonar U7 soundcard has a volume button but that is disabled (I see it on the screen but it doesn't change the volume). Changing volume on the soundcard output is not possible because than you have to change it for every channel. Alsamixer probably is an option but than I have to use a screen and keyboard/mouse when I play music. So I think the only option is to use software volume control in the MPD or spotifyd client (android device). But many say that software volume control degrades the sound. Is this really true and what else options do I have?
 
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A point of attention with this solution is the volume control. When I develop a multichannel system with this approach I will play my music by using MPD or Spotifyd (I don't own a volume controlled player for line in). Both have an option to control the music by using hardware or software controls. My Xonar U7 soundcard has a volume button but that is disabled (I see it on the screen but it doesn't change the volume). Changing volume on the soundcard output is not possible because than you have to change it for every channel. Alsamixer probably is an option but than I have to use a screen and keyboard/mouse when I play music. So I think the only option is to use software volume control in the MPD or spotifyd client (android device). But many say that software volume control degrades the sound. Is this really true and what else options do I have?

I think the main objection is that if you perform digital level control on 16 bits and dial down the level you are reducing the effective bit depth of the audio too much. The solution is to convert the 16 bit audio to 24 or 32 bits and THEN apply digital volume control. This more or less removes any problem with bit depth from the problem.

I am not 100% sure how and when MPD applies volume control to the audio stream. I know I can configure MPD to output e.g. 32 bit audio, but I do not know if the conversion from the song audio format (e.g. 16 bits) to the new format comes before or after MPD's volume control.

I would not lose any sleep of these kind of issues!
 
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