Using Pulsar II as regular windows sound card without sfp ap

kuniklo · Post by **kuniklo** » Fri May 21, 2004 1:00 am

Do I have to have the sfp application running to enable normal windows applications to use the Pulsar II as a sound output?

wayne · Post by **wayne** » Fri May 21, 2004 1:28 am

ChrisWerner · Post by **ChrisWerner** » Fri May 21, 2004 1:39 am

With SFP 3.1c and maybe 4.0(don´t have installed it yet) you can load a project called multimedia. SFPProjectsExamplesmultimedia.pro

kuniklo · Post by **kuniklo** » Fri May 21, 2004 10:02 am

It seems to work fine with the default project loaded, actually. I was just hoping that there was some way to use the Pulsar as a normal sound card without running SFP at all.

Thanks for the reply.

Post by **garyb** » Fri May 21, 2004 1:52 pm

pulsar is NOT a normal soundcard, nor should it be.

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Fri May 21, 2004 2:34 pm

actually a Pulsar/Scope card on itself is nothing at all, it doesn't even have one single function (but drawing current from the slot).
All onboard functionality is implemented by loading software on the DSPs.

A very basic part of the software builds the virtual hardware elements, which the so-called drivers (like ASIO, WDM, etc) later operate on.

Another part of the software (the one that comes more to notice) provides the routing facilities we all love so much.

And of course there's a third group of software elements that's resonsible for the actual processing of audio streams, the DSP algorithms, sometimes called 'atoms' as the building blocks of devices.

A 'regular' soundcard, for example one that uses the wide-spread AC97 codec, implements an extremely limited subset of this in a custom pre-programmed chip.
This design sacrifices audio quality for reduced production costs (simplified).

Since there's a frequent mention of the inferiority of DSP versus native CPU coding due to the huge difference in clock rates:
even very high quality (non-sound) IO-cards, like the RMEs use onboard DSPs for their mixing and routing capabilities - looks like the design isn't that outdated

just another 2 cents, Tom

kuniklo · Post by **kuniklo** » Fri May 21, 2004 5:27 pm

Ok. Thanks for the explanation. That makes more sense. I'm still pretty new to all this.

voidar · Post by **voidar** » Sat May 22, 2004 11:23 am

The closest you get to a normal operating soundcard with a pulsar is when running xtc mode, but then sadly the wave drivers are not loaded, not even if you were to add them to the XTC project file

Post by **garyb** » Sat May 22, 2004 12:16 pm

no wav playback, however wav dest works fine so you can route into another app.....