SynthMaker

Direct sound can't be started

Archive · 2012 2 old posts

From the original SynthMaker forum (2004–2014), with its members’ names and dates.

djherer ·

Hi. Have no idea what im doing but tried opening synth maker for the first time and a message appeared reading:

'Direct sound could not be started. The most likely reason for this is that you have an application running using ASIO. To solve the problem, close the application using ASIO or change it so that it uses direct sound instead.'

Synth maker is the only application open on my pc (running vista) and have no idea what settings to change to get synth maker to produce sound.. help??!

trogluddite ·

Hi there, welcome to the forum.

Sadly, this bug has been around a long time (my system does the same if I attempt to use DirectSound). Some DS drivers just do not play nicely with SM - and the "example synth" that loads after a fresh install uses DirectSound by default. Depending on what hardware you have, you may be able to use one of two solutions...

1) If your soundcard has an ASIO driver, use that instead - remove the "DS out" block from the synth and replace it with an "ASIO out" instead. ASIO drivers give better performance in every way compared to DS - but not every soundcard manufacturer produces the drivers.

2) If your card does not have native ASIO drivers, you can try the free "ASIO4All" software - this can add ASIO functions to soundcards that don't have their own driver for it. This works better on some systems than others - it all depends on the exact chips etc. used by your soundcard. To use ASIO4All in SM, replace the DS with ASIO as above.

Note that there are no "soundcard settings" options in any of SM's menu's - it is all done with the "DS Out" or "ASIO Out" modules that you put into your SM design - to choose a soundcard, or turn audio on/off, click the labels on the body of the modules. I also suggest emailing [email removed] to report the bug - giving them as much detail of your PC as possible. This will keep up the pressure on the developers to find a fix.

Good luck getting up and running!

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