1) foo_sid refuses to play Stormlord subsongs 2 through 5 (ie all but the first). No error message, just silence.

2) While seeking, foo_sid hogs the CPU to such an extent that my system is unresponsive and mouse movement even stops intermittently. This hopefully just means the decoding thread's priority is set too high (could you please fix?), but if a kernel mode driver is involved (which would presumably be foobar's fault not foo_sid's) then I will be disturbed. (I hate programs, such as Winamp, which install (unsigned!) kernel mode drivers without asking permission, and bypassing Windows's warning!)

3) (@kode54) Would you please provide the source code? (reSID / libsidplay are GPL)

I'm sorry to hear that. Is it a version featured in the High Voltage SID Collection? Original rip, or modified to work with older versions of sidplay?


I suppose this is due to how I interface with the sidplay2 library and/or resid. The current solution, as it has always been, is to brute force decode up to the target position. The most recent change I have made to the core settings is to disable the "optimization", which really means to switch between two playback modes supported by this (likely old) version of sidplay. Either it runs N cycles, then renders N cycles of SID output, or it runs 1 cycle of each at a time. The former should sound identical to the latter, if in fact the emulator renders whenever the CPU accesses the emulated SID, but in fact it does not. Possibly because the former method lacks any sort of downsampling, anti-aliasing, or other bandwidth limiting.

I suppose I could disable optimization in the seeking, or even disable the resid altogether, but I'm sure there's probably a better way. I just haven't gotten around to fixing the problem.


Yes, playback and/or seeking bogging down your system would be a problem with thread priority.


However, thread priority has nothing to do with my input, or any other input for that matter, since foobar2000 handles playback threads itself. You can find the relevant setting under Preferences, Advanced, Playback, Thread priority.


Nope, no kernel mode drivers.


Oh my, is this something other than the CD recording engine? I'm a little behind.


Certainly, you can find the packages in the same place as my components.

No special version, just the current one from HVSC. I don't think it's been updated recently either.



*shrug* it's up to you if you want to update to the latest version.



I'm sure libsidplay does a lot of processing which could be omitted when the audio output is unwanted. I bet the filter uses a lot of (PC) CPU cycles. In fact VICE has an option to disable the filter, so doing so is probably an existing feature of libsidplay.



Thanks for the tip. Maybe one of us should suggest to Peter Pawlowski that the default not be "realtime" or whatever 7 corresponds to.



I don't know, something called pxhelp20.sys from Sonic Solutions. I don't care what it does, it's unnecessary and unwanted, and when I tried to get rid of it by deleting registry entries I screwed up my DVD-ROM drive (Windoze now thinks it's an unknown type of drive rather than DVD-ROM. Still sort of works but I should get around to fixing it properly)

@kode54: I found another SID which doesn't work: Bouncy_Balls_speech_PSID.sid - none of the 17 subsongs will play!

Actually, it's simply been a while since I looked for updates, since I don't actively follow HVSC to see if every single file out there plays.


I'll see what I can do.


This is more a problem of my input having processor intensive features hard-coded on instead of optional and disabled by default.


That would be part of the CD recording package which is included with the Full installer. Possibly only installed with the CD Rip & Burn option, under Winamp Library -> Core Media Library Components. Did you try removing Winamp before or after you started deleting entries from your system registry?



I'll look into these files, it's probably something wrong with the old version of the player I'm using.

I disagree. Performing a long computation is a perfectly normal and necessary thing for a program to do - it only becomes a problem if it starves other processes of the CPU.


Ah... no. (neither) Winamp is still kind of useful to keep as an alternate player. (though it's horrible bloatware since version 3)

I did however back up the registry keys I deleted so I'm pretty sure I can restore my system to its previous state.