14Bit-Noteplayer audio issues

[lem79]

Hi all, this is a bit random, but I'm having terrible audio issues with DeliTracker Noteplayer genies (14Bit-Noteplayer, and the 8 and 32 Voice noteplayers) under FS-UAE and Ubutnu 12.04 AMD64.

I'm using an FX-4170 (4.2GHz), so it's well fast enough to run FS-UAE. In SysInfo, I see ~70-80 MIPS without JIT, and around 850 MIPS with JIT. The DrWhoGenie also runs in 1024x768 full screen around 30fps. It's just the 14Bit-Noteplayer will always try to lower the sample rate, and the sound output is terrible quality. This is a sign of insufficient CPU power for the requested mixing rate and effects on a normal Amiga. The same also happens on an AMD E-350 (1.6GHz), but worse due to the CPU being so much slower.

I'm having exactly the same issue with E-UAE. I've tried it under different distributions too (Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, both AMD64), same result, which is stuttering and low quality audio. This never happened in Ubuntu 11.10 and previous versions as far as I could tell.

My setup is a basic WB3.1, 32mb fast, 2mb chip, 4mb P96, A4000/040 preset in FS-UAE. This install has worked for years with E-UAE, and now works with FS-UAE too, aside from this audio issue.

Has anyone else experienced similar? Let me know if you want the postcard-ware version of the 14Bit-Noteplayer, it was removed at one point from the DeliTracker distribution, but it's great. I've been using it for 4950 days or so, according to the startup requester, lol. (been using it longer than that actually, this is an install from 1998 or so, I was using 14Bit-Noteplayer in 1996)

At the very least, is anyone able to successfully use the 14Bit-Noteplayer under DeliTracker (e.g. for playing an S3M or XM), and have decent audio output at 28836Hz? (or anything above 22kHz mixing rate at least?)

Cheers

EDIT:
Oh, using FS-UAE 1.3.30, tried from Frode's PPA, also building from source with -march=native, no changes.

Actually in case anyone was interested, I'm using a script I found on a Gentoo forum (analyze-x86) to see what the instruction mix is in compiled binaries, FS-UAE with -march=native on Ubuntu 12.04 on a Bulldozer is thusly:

analyze-x86.sh `which fs-uae`
Disassembling /usr/bin/fs-uae, please wait...

MMX: 1678
SSE: 372
Enh 3DNow: 0
SSE2: 465
SSE3: 0
SSSE3: 0
SSE4A: 0
SSE4.1: 0
SSE4.2: 0
AVX: 2365
FMA: 0
FMA4: 19

[ant512]

Originally Posted by lem79

My setup is a basic WB3.1, 32mb fast, 2mb chip, 4mb P96, A4000/040 preset in FS-UAE. This install has worked for years with E-UAE, and now works with FS-UAE too, aside from this audio issue.

I vaguely remember from my days of owning a Cybervision that it was possible to greatly improve the playback quality of various tools by opening a DblPAL screen and switching back to a P96 screen. That upped the clock speed of the chipset so it could handle higher playback frequencies. Dunno if it would work under emulation, though.

[Zack]

That could be the DoubleDMA genie. Thats what I use on my A4000/CV64 anyway
It doesn't seem to be included in the DeliTracker232.lha archive on Aminet, so I don't remember where I got it. But I could upload it the The Zone if you want to test it.

[Photon]

If you want to see how good an Amiga can sound, you should use an Amiga. All emulators emulate sound digitally, which will make it sound worse.

If you want to use a PC, there are trackers on PC that will open your songs and adds quality and features. It, too, will play the sound digitally, which will make it sound worse.

Don't get me wrong, I have a studio and love the best digital sound quality possible. But I've also analyzed 8-bit and 15-bit sound on Amiga and compared with PC, and I think you will not get it to sound as intended.

The reason is the Delitracker coders never intended it to go out of a random PC sound card, and emulator coders don't do dynamics.

Either way, if you're just trying to get this to run smoothly I wish you luck of course.

[Toni Wilen]

I am quite sure 14-bit audio low level noise (I think this was Photon's problem?) is fixed in recent 2.5 winuae beta. (Volume 64 is not same as 63)

I don't think analog has nothing to do with anyway, Paula volume is digital PWM, analog part (filter/pre-amp) has to be linear because 14-bit audio simply wouldn't sound good with non-linear audio circuitry

UAE core also supports doublescan mode 56KHz audio but it won't work correctly if custom chipset/RTG vsync is not handled separately, this depends on non-core code.

[lem79]

Thanks for the replies guys.

The audio output quality is perfectly fine with the normal 4 channel Paula Noteplayer. It's just when a CPU-dependent mixing Noteplayer is used, the mixing rate jumps around (usually downwards until it hits about 11kHz) as if the emulated CPU was too slow. I'll do some more testing in the next 48-72 hours with other programs (EaglePlayer perhaps, OctaMED SoundStudio, and other Noteplayers in DeliTracker) to see if the issue is specific to DeliTracker.

As I said previously, this was never a problem previously for me, but seems to have recently become a problem. I'm not sure if it's hardware or software. I've tested two CPUs (FX-4170, E-350) so far with the same version of Ubuntu (12.04 AMD64) and FS-UAE (1.3.30 i386). I'll try a Phenom II soon as well.

A possibly related problem is Alien Breed 3D 2 TKG running very poorly on the same system/install, even though SysInfo shows plenty of MIPS to spare, and the DrWhoGenie runs very well, even fullscreen.

[lem79]

Originally Posted by Zack

That could be the DoubleDMA genie. Thats what I use on my A4000/CV64 anyway
It doesn't seem to be included in the DeliTracker232.lha archive on Aminet, so I don't remember where I got it. But I could upload it the The Zone if you want to test it.

That sounds very interesting Zack. I do remember the higher scanning screenmodes enabling higher mixing rates. Seemed to be coupled to the horizontal frequency. i.e. could get about 31kHz output from a 15kHz PAL screen. Choosing a multisync/VGA/scan doubled res enabled ~60kHz audio output. Pretty neat

[Toni Wilen]

I guess it probably misdetects lack of CPU speed. Do you get better sound if CPU speed is not set to JIT or fastest possible? (=CPU speed is "unstable")

[Photon]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

I am quite sure 14-bit audio low level noise (I think this was Photon's problem?) is fixed in recent 2.5 winuae beta. (Volume 64 is not same as 63)

A great fix, but my reply was more like general advice. Even a raw sample from Amiga played in a PC wave editor will not sound like the Amiga output. It's much less forgiving, so in general you would want to play and compose Amiga songs on Amiga. I have long since given up composing anything in WinUAE.

A bad comparison which is a bit similar is to play 128kbps .mp3s on $2000 studio monitors. Every single song will have audible artifacts.

[lem79]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

I guess it probably misdetects lack of CPU speed. Do you get better sound if CPU speed is not set to JIT or fastest possible? (=CPU speed is "unstable")

Ok just tested FS-UAE 1.3.30 with model A1200/020, 32mb of FastRAM (Z3). SysInfo reported about 4.2 MIPS, everything else identical, DeliTracker + 14Bit Noteplayer played and mixed perfectly, a 4 channel mod at 28836Hz. Originally I had bass and treble adjusted, along with panning enabled, which caused it to downscale mixing to 22kHz, but disabling those allowed me to select 28kHz again.

So yep, only happens with "fastest possible" and/or JIT. This never used to happen with E-UAE with JIT enabled on my Phenom IIs or Athlon X2s..

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by Photon

my reply was more like general advice.

Ah. Yeah, UAE sound output emulates what sound would be if Paula DACs and all external analog circuitry are ideal.

Have you tried Sinc + filter mode set to "Emulated (A500 or A1200)"? It should be more closer to real hardware because it also emulates filter circuitry that is always enabled (There are two filters, "led" filter and always on filter that afaik is required to filter out volume PWM noise). Must use recent beta, older version had clipping problem with Sinc.

Originally Posted by lem79

So yep, only happens with "fastest possible" and/or JIT. This never used to happen with E-UAE with JIT enabled on my Phenom IIs or Athlon X2s..

CPU speed detection code has overflow or underflow problem. Not rare.

[FrodeSolheim]

I won't claim that fast-possible-mode is perfectly implemented in FS-UAE. It is a feature I have not completely understood yet, and while I have made it work reasonably well in FS-UAE, there may very well be issues with it, and it probably works better in WinUAE.

If the implementation of fastest-possible-mode in FS-UAE is at fault, it will be interesting/useful to use this as a testcase when trying to improve the feature. I am not familiar with the software you are referring to, so a simple step-by-step guide to what to install/run to try to reproduce the issue would be useful to me.

Originally Posted by lem79

I'm having exactly the same issue with E-UAE. I've tried it under different distributions too (Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, both AMD64), same result, which is stuttering and low quality audio. This never happened in Ubuntu 11.10 and previous versions as far as I could tell.

But the fact that you have the same problem in E-UAE is interesting, and strengthens Toni's idea that it may be an under-/overflow problem. When you say that this problem never occured with Ubuntu 11.10, was this only on a slower computer? (i.e., you have not tried E-UAE/Ubuntu 11.10 on your fast computer?).

[lem79]

I did some more testing. Ubuntu 11.10 is no good either (tested with e-uae:i386 from the Ubuntu repository, same configs and Amiga install). Ubuntu 11.04 however, runs flawlessly. I tested 11.04 with Richard Drummond's E-UAE from his website:

e-uae_0.8.29-WIP4_linux-amd64_sdl-alsa.tar.bz2

I only needed to apt-get install ia32-libs on Ubuntu 11.04 to make that work. Just extract it and run uae from the top level directory. That particular build looks for ~/.uaerc, whereas Ubuntu-packaged versions of E-UAE these days (in 12.04, for example) look for ~/.e-uaerc

That same binary runs on 12.04, and has the same down-scaling of the mixing rate as the newer builds of E-UAE, and also FS-UAE.

Also is there anything else I should test, various config options etc?

Thanks

And, DeliTracker:
DeliTracker 2.32.lha from Aminet

The 14Bit-Noteplayer I've been using (postcard-ware version, AFAIK has the most features) is attached to this post. I added .68k to it, assuming that's the "extension" we use for Amiga executables, so just rename it to 14Bit-NotePlayer and put it in the DeliGenies/ directory after installing DeliTracker. The archive on Aminet does come with a 14Bit player, but it's only 11k vs 32k.

To set the 14Bit player to the default, open the Genies window, then triple-click the 14Bit player. An F will appear beside its name, indicating it's "First" in the Noteplayer selection. D means "Disabled", however. If DeliTracker isn't playing your mods, make sure the required players are moved from the PlayerStore directory which is inside the DeliPlayers directory. FastTracker2 and ScreamTracker3 players are in DeliPlayers by default, so DeliTracker will play those with a default install.

I've tried the recent Ubuntus in 2D mode, in case it was Unity/Compiz getting in the way, but that made no difference.

I've also tried forcing my CPU cores to their maximum pstate (4.2GHz), in case frequency scaling was getting in the way. That didn't fix anything either.

Amusingly, under Ubuntu 11.04 with E-UAE, SysInfo reported ~1050 MIPS.. lol. And yes, it was buttery smooth on the Amiga desktop, including full screen DrWhoGenie and other scopes simultaneously. Very nice indeed. Here's a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/CVsyP.png

So, I guess it's something that changed in later versions of Ubuntu (also occurs on OpenSUSE though). I haven't been able to run the 64bit version of E-UAE on Ubuntu 12.04 since it segfaults

Frode, is there a way to set FS-UAE to emulate a fast 020 or 030 (say 50MHz)? Without using maximum CPU speed, that is?

[lem79]

Just a little update in my testing:

Installed an Ubuntu 11.04 AMD64 virtual machine under VirtualBox on Ubuntu 12.04, and E-UAE runs much better under the VM than under the host (my regular desktop that is). There's an occasional hiccup in performance, but most of the time it works well.

I haven't built FS-UAE for Ubuntu 11.04 to test, but seeing as E-UAE and FS-UAE exhibit the same issues under 12.04, I suspect E-UAE is a good enough test?

Does that help narrow this issue down at all?

[FrodeSolheim]

Hi, I followed your instructions and tested a bit with the 14-bit noteplayer.

Originally Posted by lem79

Frode, is there a way to set FS-UAE to emulate a fast 020 or 030 (say 50MHz)? Without using maximum CPU speed, that is?

Try starting with an A1200 config, use the internal uae option "cpu_multipler" to increase the emulated CPU cycles (If I remember correctly, 4 is default for 68020, so 8 is 2x and 16 is 4x):

amiga_model = A1200/020
uae_cpu_multipler = 16

I followed your instructions, and after not getting it to work for a while, removing the "ProTracker (External)" player made 14bit-noteplayer work ;-). My tests here seems to mirror your results; using fastest-possible mode, the DMA rate does not match the specified mixing rate.

However, when using the above config, the DMA rate is stable...

(I'm currently focusing on getting 2.0 out the door to replace the current stable 1.2 version. Reviewing the stability/performance of the fastest-possible mode in FS-UAE is a non-trivial task I will have to get back to later :-/)

[lem79]

That uae_cpu_multiplier workaround works very well here Frode, thanks.

I did some more testing. I used the FS-UAE 1.3.31u3 i386 Debian package from your development download site and tested it under Ubuntu 11.04 AMD64 (with ia32-libs installed). The behaviour is the same as under 12.04, where the DMA rate drops instantly. I tried compiling a 64bit version of FS-UAE 1.3.31u3 under Ubuntu 11.04 too, same behaviour. E-UAE i586 from Richard Drummond's site however works fine in this configuration, whereas it doesn't on Ubuntu 12.04. This performance issue seems to affect Alien Breed 3D 2 - TKG also, if I hadn't mentioned that yet.

Thanks for your great work (Toni too, I realise you've been actively developing WinUAE for years now, thanks!)