If you guys are feeling generous this holiday season, I would love it if you could take the EMPEG_MIXER_SETSAM ioctl out of the player pause/unpause logic so we can play sounds from userland apps while the player is paused. More info on this request here.

I know v2.0 has had more feature creep than a NASA toilet seat, but it seems to me there's no reason to mute the DSP when the player is paused... If I'm wrong, please correct me... I personally don't hear any difference between "no data" pause and "soft audio mute" pause as Hugo suggests in the aforementioned thread, so I think this would be really helpful for those of us writing user apps which want to output sound when the player is paused.

I would be equally happy if it were configurable, for those who want the entire player muted when they pause it. i.e. a "mute_on_pause" option in config.ini.

So whaddya say, fellas?

I personally don't hear any difference between "no data" pause and "soft audio mute" pause

Sure, when you're playing MP3s. But what about when the active source is the tuner or the aux?

It can be tested, after all...

Grr, I meant to test it out this morning on my way to work but I was listening to MP3's the whole way in. Forgot to switch to tuner. I will test it tonight.

It's not the background noise that I'm concerned about - I suspect that most peoples' noise comes from after the empeg anyway. What concerns me is that we know that SAM is supposed to be used to avoid large (potentially speaker-damaging) transients during certain operations and without knowing exactly where the player uses SAM, we can only guess as to what we'd need to test. Sneaking it in is not the way to go here - it definitely needs to be in an alpha build, and preferably a beta too (assuming alpha was ok) so that any problems arising from such a change are more likely to get caught.

For the record, I don't hear any problems arising from this so far. But then again, when I developed the bass/treble code in hijack, there was an early version that sounded ok to me, with tiny transient clicks when the value was changed. Apparantly that same version nearly blew Tony's eardrums out - so I'm inclined to suggest caution.

Well, as it turns out, the tuner mute depends on SAM. With the SETSAM ioctl() dummied, there's no way to mute the tuner. So I guess one of the Empeg guys would have to chime in and tell us whether there's another way for the player app to mute the tuner without setting the DSP to SAM. If not, then it's back to the drawing board.

I don't have anything connected to my AUX input, but I'm guessing the same rule applies to AUX.

So for now, I am going to try to find a nice neat way to intelligently toggle SAM while the audio overlay buffers are playing, but I don't know how easy that's gonna be.

I think I'm gonna drop a quick email to Peter asking for a little more info about when SAM is used, and if it is indeed used for these so-called "transients."

Incidentally, I would be happy to alpha test v2.0.

Incidentally, I would be happy to alpha test v2.0.

Good luck. I offered bribes, and when that was rebuffed I offered to take bribes. That didn't work either.

Tony, I think that I've resolved the SAM/overlay interaction in the kernel, so this shouldn't be necessary anymore - check the TTS/Flite thread in Programming...