Like any serious music listener, I want every quality tweak I can get. I use the foobar2000 player and it works fine in conjunction with my DAC & FX, but on advice from some ‘experts’, I installed the Wasapi driver plugin to foobar, (it provides unmodified audio from the PC). The trouble is that the output must be set to Wasapi and be made exclusive, which puts FX out of operation.
If anyone knows how I might get the Wasapi driver and FX to work together I would appreciate any advice.
Hi Brock,
As far as I know, the FxSound driver needs to be set as the Default Device.
So, once again, as far as I know, it doesn’t seem possible - to me.
@PLEASE_DELETE, @bvijay: Advice welcome, thanks.
Count me out; i am using AIMP as audio player since years and i never used foobar2000 or the WASAPI.
Noted.
Thanks for answering though.
Also, if I’m not mistaken, there’s a paradox here.
Ask yourself, what do you want: objective audio (Wasapi), or more enjoyable audio (FxSound)?
Personally, I’ve chosen FxSound, in moderation.
I agree and thanks for the replies. I will still continue investigating this, both Wasapi & ASIO drivers have the ability to stop windows from processing the audio and deliver it via USB raw to the DAC, there is no doubt from articles read that this improves sound quality. But having tested it the quality improvement is not as much as we get with FX, so yes it’s best to just stick with FX. Maybe I will find an article on how to manage using both.
Just a friendly reminder…
“Audiophiles don’t use their equipment to listen to your music. Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment.” - Alan Parsons
I love this citation by Alan Parsons
What is the difference between Musicophile and audiophile?
Audiophile: In love with how music sounds on their equipment.
Musiphile: Loves how music itself sounds - on any equipment - Especially with FX Sound. I place myself largely in the latter category .
Yes, i used to use foobar and it not fit Wasapi and ASIO (foobar not recommend), but with AIMP it works well, iam using wasapi
FX make sound very good with my DAC, i can feel the music much better
You can try
It seems that wasapi or ASIO plugins dose not work well together even with MusicBee if i try to mess with those 2 MusicBee will freeze and crash and to be honest i really dont care because love with how music sounds with FxSound
ASIO bypasses the Windows audio subsystem and allows a direct path from applications to the audio hardware. WASAPI which was introduced in Windows Vista has two modes shared mode and exclusive mode. WASAPI exclusive mode does the same function as ASIO, by allowing an application to directly access the audio hardware.
Combining ASIO and WASAPI to exclusively use the same audio hardware is not possible.
Here is the documentation on Windows audio architecture which will give some idea on the exclusive mode.
User-Mode Audio Components - Win32 apps | Microsoft Learn
On FxSound support for WASAPI and exclusive mode. WASAPI and exclusive mode support requires corresponding audio driver implementation. The audio driver should implement WaveRT interface to support WASAPI and exclusive mode. But FxSound audio driver implements the older WaveCyclic interface. So, applications cannot enable exclusive mode on FxSound.