UADE (Windows) - Invalid libao driver

[Qube]

Hey all,

I keep getting a "Invalid libao driver" error when trying to use the Windows UADE 2.13 cygwin binary to convert exotic Amiga musics into WAV.

I can play the music fine using UADE 2.13, but trying to convert to WAV is just not working for me at all,

Any ideas?

My command line is :-

uade123 med.ingame1 -e output.wav -f wav

Cheers!

Q;

[Genju]

You have to use

uade123 song.blah -f filename.wav

[Qube]

Thank ya! - I guess my mind was not reading the switches right lol.

Q;

[Genju]

No problemo! By the way, for optimal sound quality, change the resampler to "sinc" in uade.conf.

# Set resampling method to default, sinc or none. The default is recommended.

resampler sinc

[Hewitson]

For optimal sound quality you'd surely disable the resampling (and filter) entirely..

I've never understood why lamers put all these resamplers and filters into their players. Reminds me of Dolby Noise Reduction on tapes, they always sounded horrible with this turned on.

[Toni Wilen]

Right..

All software Amiga module players or Paula emulation have to use resampling. You can't disable it.

anti and sinc are higher quality resamplers designed for Amiga sample rates, not some stupid filters or something.

[Hewitson]

I'm pretty sure the GUS could play sounds of any samplerate. Surely some modern soundcards have this feature.

[Toni Wilen]

Yes but unfortunately it isn't that simple.

Most (all?) sound APIs don't support accurate on the fly sample rate, volume or sample position changes that most Amiga modules require without use of resampling.

[Genju]

UADE renders the sound at 3.x MHz internally, you simply cannot avoid resampling. And the sinc resampler has the best quality of the available options, so go for that and be happy.

[andreas]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Reminds me of Dolby Noise Reduction on tapes, they always sounded horrible with this turned on.

You're generalizing too much!
This comparison might be valid for "consumer's dolby NR" aka Dolby B, granted. That's why I too had jumped on that argumentation train before.
However, once a friend of mine showed me his (post-1989) Nakamichi deck (that alone cost half of my whole stereo hi-fi equipment!) which provided a high-end implementation of Dolby C (though lacked Dolby S), I had to concede that it sounded absolutely perfect. But B still sounded godawful (even on this hi-end thing), whilst A was above average, but not really "good." Thus C is not comparable to B in any way, admittedly. (Let alone the rare and ridiculously pricey Dolby S implementation.)

[Qube]

@Genju - thanks for the tip about the sinc resampling, will try that out.

Any recommendations or ideas regards post-processing to make converted amiga tracks a little more listenable through headphones, I've tried some channel mixing etc, just wondered if anybody else had any quick theories on this? I use Audacity to do sound editing work.

Cheers all,

Q;

[Hewitson]

Personally I think it's bad enough a real Amiga isn't being used, I wouldn't make things even more inaccurate by mixing the channels. But here you go

Originally Posted by uade.conf

# Set panning panning value. Mixes left and right channels together affinely
# (in linear fashion).

#panning                0.7