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Forum: General Discussion

Topic: URGENT: How can I modify/change VDJ MP3 decoder engine??? - Page: 1

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Last night I did a little test with my Hercules MK2/VDJ. Since I've bought the MK2, I'm really impressed with its fuctionality in conjunction with VDJ but the main PROBLEM I have is the quality of the sound, its horrible especially if I'm attached to a BIG SOUND SYSTEM/ POWERED SPEAKERS.

I was assumingly pin-pointing the problem to the MK2 soundcard but on the contrary it seems to be VDJ MP3 sound engine. How I verified that is, if I open a relative low quality MP3 in VDJ, the output of sound is terrible, but when I use Winamp of even Windows Media Player, the sound is immensly enhanced, and remember I'm still using the MK2 as the soundcard.

In a nutshell, I want to re-direct the VDJ MP3 Decoder engine to a another 3rd party software or even Media Player, can this be done....HEEELPPP!!!
 
Inviato Thu 22 Jun 06 @ 8:08 pm
The sound engine will be changed in the next update, which you will receive free, when it is done. They are beta testing that update now, but there is not a release date yet. In the meantime, there may be some tweaks that you can do to make your music sound better. I don't have that problem, and I am using a pretty good sound system, and play every type of music.
 
Inviato Thu 22 Jun 06 @ 8:53 pm
I'm open for suggestions interms of tweaks becauz the sound engine is lame to me...
 
Inviato Fri 23 Jun 06 @ 3:10 am
Make sure you turn off limiter inside VDJ and set gain to always Zero.
Should give you good sound.

Also, make sure your MP3s have high bitrate

And yea, as said, VDJ 4 is a brand new soundengine that has GREAT soundquality.... :)
 
Inviato Fri 23 Jun 06 @ 7:30 am
Disable limiter, time stretch, and master tempo.
 
Inviato Fri 23 Jun 06 @ 7:42 am
SupaconPRO InfinityMember since 2005
I dunno if this is related, but my video files have atrocious sound quality - they all have 48 KHz sampling rate, which Virtual DJ doesn't deal with well for some reason.

Is this related to your problem? Do you have higher sampling rate files for some reason?
 
Inviato Fri 23 Jun 06 @ 1:57 pm
So I can re-direct the engine, itz impossible to execute this ??? I adore transparency between user and application, thats one of the main success of LINUX
 
Inviato Sat 24 Jun 06 @ 10:22 pm
Bren FPRO InfinityMember since 2003
@ Supacon, VDJ 3.4 can't handle Music videos with Audio of 48khz, this is a bug in the current version, some have chosen to extract music videos/sound at 44k.1khz instead as this solves the problem, and also provides CD quality, if however you don't want to do this you could always be patient for the Virtual DJ 4 which features a new sound engine.
 
Inviato Sat 24 Jun 06 @ 10:57 pm
Okay, you guys still never answered the man's original question. Supacon, go into the config for VDJ and click on the extensions tab. There you can choose to use VDJ's internal engine or an installed external engine. (For both videos and audio)
 
Inviato Mon 26 Jun 06 @ 2:33 am
I'm pretty sure that's just to decode the source to an uncompressed wav which still needs to get passed through Virtual DJ's engine otherwise what you effectively have is winamp, which isn't great for dj purposes. Someone made a good post explaining why the sound quality isn't always as good as it should be, to do with high level processing or something but I've forgotten who posted it now.
 
Inviato Mon 26 Jun 06 @ 2:36 am
No it will use the external engine. That is the point of the setting. I sometimes use it, especially with my 48khz videos which makes them sound oh so much better. The original VDJ engine doesn't handle 48khz very well at all.
 
Inviato Mon 26 Jun 06 @ 2:38 am
If that were true, your ram usage wouldn't be more than a few megabytes when you mix mp3s. Sure enough you can change the decoder but it is still Virtual DJ outputting it's own sound. But I'm talking about output, I think you're talking about the decoding only.
 
Inviato Mon 26 Jun 06 @ 2:41 am
{sigh} The decoding engine is the major part of it. If you don't have proper decoding your sound will be crap. So if you use another decoding engine you solve the problem. Of course VDJ has to do the output. Andrew, why are you going back and forth with me on this?
 
Inviato Mon 26 Jun 06 @ 3:03 am
From what I've gathered across these forums, most mp3 sound complaints seem to be related with the output of sound because of Virtual DJs engine and not due to the decoding of sound; we've been told the new 'better' engine has been written from scratch so therefore it's safe to assume that a lot of the problem lies with the way Virtual DJ processes the audio after it's been decoded?

If the problem was all down to the decoder wouldn't a 1kb downloadable registry file 'fix' the problem for everyone by setting Virtual DJ to use the same decoder as used by other applications?
 
Inviato Mon 26 Jun 06 @ 3:15 am
No. Because that would assume that the proper decoding engine is already installed on your system. I believe the programmers realized their decoding engine had some shortcomings which is why you are given the option of using their engine or not. If I were to believe your argument, then the sound on my 48khz encoded videos would sound the same with or without the VDJ engine which indeed they do not. I work on a very high wattage club sound system, and I can tell the difference. It is like night and day. You also have to realize that the 'engine' as we put it, is responsible for the decoding of the sound. The output is actually handled by your sound card's driver.
 
Inviato Mon 26 Jun 06 @ 4:39 am
Ok that's cool, thanks for explaining that a bit further. I thought the 'engine' was causing the quality of the sound to drop because of its realtime processing related to effects and pitch adjustments. I know the output is handled by your soundcard, but it is Virtual DJ sending the raw wav data to it. Seeing as just about every windows xp pc can decode mp3 right from the start using Fraunhofer wouldn't it make sense to use that as the default decoder or offer advice to people to change the mp3 decoder to the default windows one. When I mentioned the registry tweak I was only specifying for the mp3 decoder; similarly I thought the option to change decoder was for 'unsupported' formats like flac; I guess multimedia compression is funny, when you compress a zip file it doesn't matter what you use to decode it, the quality is always the same.

What decoder do you use for 48khz audio? I'm sure you'd make a lot of users happy if you added a blog entry for it or something, seeing as so many people are having to go through the painstaking process of converting all their vobs to 44khz.
 
Inviato Mon 26 Jun 06 @ 4:47 am
Hey DJ in Norway,

I followed your instructions and it actually made a difference. Just need to hook it up to my high wattage Sound System now. Quick question though, the features which you instructed me to disable, whay exactly are thier functionalites ???
 
Inviato Mon 26 Jun 06 @ 4:56 am
Hey Andrew, sorry if I was getting a little testy. I wasn't if you didn't understand what I was saying or if you were debating the issue. Sorry if there was any misunderstanding.
 
Inviato Mon 26 Jun 06 @ 6:31 am
Hey andrew,

If the program isnt listed in the drop down menu, is there a way to explore and add it ???
 
Inviato Mon 26 Jun 06 @ 5:26 pm
djderricke no problem, I think a combination of what we both said is true because you can use virtualdj to play from an incoming soundcard signal (e.g. tcv bypass) and the audio isn't as good as if it were going straight through to the mixer (afterall what is there to decode from such an input, every program should interprete it the same?), but maybe this is down to a users hardware.

streaming_DJ, if you enter Virtual DJ's configuration pages and enter the settings tab you can make the changes in there. For example, click on mp3 and then press the change button. Now you can change the mp3 decoder to your windows default (General Windows MediaPlayer audio decoder). This should then use your default directsound decoder for the specifyed format, so you may have to use some register commands in windows, although I belive by default Windows users the Fraunhofer decoder.
 
Inviato Mon 26 Jun 06 @ 5:50 pm
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