Delta Control Panel missing a Sample Rate lock button

[tribat]

So its kinda annoying when you have your M-Audio card as the default playback device since all the programs keep changing the sample rate to whatever they want, so you gotta always manually go change it back to whatever you wanna use.

Couldn't there be a lock feature to lock the sample rate to certain value and programs that need to use different sampling rates could be resampled to the one that is locked atm. I believe this is how E-mu has done it ;)

[Paul]

Re-sampling degrades the quality of the audio. Technically it is better to have the sample rate change to whatever is called for by the application. Is this causing some kind of problem for you?

[tribat]

Well say you have a video player or music player using the sound card with 44.1 kHz sampling rate and you start a DAW application that requires a higher sampling rate. Now it can't acquire the sound card before you make all the applications using the sound card with the lower sample rate close the sound device.

But after the DAW application has been started and the new higher sample rate has been locked, you can use music players and video players just fine. I'm not really sure where the resampling is happening in this case, prolly windows taking care of it?

[Paul]

There are certain functional compromises that need to be made when the integrity of the audio is the top priority. The need to close the media player apps before launching the DAW is one of them.

All resampling for audio in Windows is done in the Windows kernel mixer. This resampled audio (usually at 22kHz) is then sent to the soundcard. M-Audio devices bypass the Windows kernel mixer to improve performance and maintain the integrity of the audio.

[tribat]

But seriously when using 1010lt as the default sound card it gets almost impossible to change the sample rate to anything other than 44.1 kHz

Sometimes its not that clear what is holding the sound card open and i don't know of any way in windows to get a list of the processes using sound card. So often times i just have to run my DAW at 44.1 kHz sample rate and its not cool at all :(

Any suggestions?