[Caution when using amp simulators]

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Hello.

I am a fan of the Neural DSP amp simulator.

I would like to report to you all about a problem I encountered using the Sound ID Reference.

I am using mac OS and was using Sound ID reference with default settings.
(This means that the application was in a state to start when the OS started up.)

After an update to it one day, the amp simulator stopped launching as a standalone application.

After some trial and error to find out the cause, I found out that the Sound ID Reference has a function that monopolises the audio output, and unless these settings are deactivated, the Amp Simulator may not detect the audio input/output settings and may freeze.

(These are my ad hoc verifications, so I don't know if they are accurate or not.)

If I turned those settings off from the settings screen, I was able to use the system without any problems.

I am Japanese and my English is not good, so I don't know if this is accurate.

But I hope I can help you to solve your problem.

Thank you.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

1 comment

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This is an interesting case, thanks for posting! 

Audio device handling on computer startup can be tricky, especially when various software components are trying to use a specific output device in exclusive mode (making it unavailable for other components). We haven't done any testing with Neural DSP, so I'm not exactly familiar with how it works on the operating system audio engine level. 

There are a few things of things to keep in mind though, and have a closer look at:

  • Does the driver of your audio output device support multi-client functionality (meaning, does its driver actually support the functionality of being used by multiple input sources at the same time?)? This is usually a more prominent issue with mon-multi-client ASIO devices on Windows, but can probably play a role with certain drivers on macOS too.
  • You might want to check if there are any kind of exclusive mode settings in Neural DSP - perhaps the conflict can be eliminated by turning off exclusive mode settings for it.
  • In terms of Neural DSP not launching at all (or crashing) as a result of this, this is definitely a problem with Neural DSP specifically, so you'll want to report this to Neural DSP support. Any such application should have a mechanism for handling device availability aspects. If the output device is not available (for any reason), the app should be able to handle that, and should launch fine regardless of a specific output device is not being available - there should be a mechanism that switches to a different available device, or simply launches without any output devices available (perhaps giving a warning dialog that there are no output devices available, or something similar). If output device availability causes the app to not launch at all, this is a functionality problem with the app (Neural DSP).
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