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Different audio device for radio

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Different audio device for radio

Postby mase » Mon Aug 05, 2013 2:25 pm

Hi!
Sometimes the engine sound is that loud, that you cannot understand
the radio sound, when the main sound and radio come from the same
speakers. For myself I am using an USB headset, which Linux,
and most other OS, register as a different soundcard. I would suggest
an option for fgfs to route all the radio sounds to a specific sound device.
That also would be more realistic.
I see more and more people using fgcom. Either fgcom should be
integrated in fgfs, or all the radio sounds should be routed to fgcom,
because fgcom would block the sound device where the headset is
connected.
What do you think?
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Re: Different audio device for radio

Postby zakalawe » Mon Aug 05, 2013 3:21 pm

As an idea, it's great (and has been suggested many times before)

The problem is the underlying audio-layers (OpenAL, and whatever it is implemented on top of, which can be many things, especially on Linux), don't necessarily support either selecting the device (on Mac), or multiple devices open from the same application concurrently. All the issues are probably solvable with time and patience, but it's a tough problem since there is no good, free, cross-platform audio library out there which does what we need; PortAudio is not actively maintained, for example, and OpenAL itself has implementation issues in different places.

If you'd be interested in experimenting in this area, please do so - in theory you can open up a secondary OpenAL context, and the FGFX layer knows whether a sound is radio, environment or so on.
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Re: Different audio device for radio

Postby mase » Mon Aug 05, 2013 4:13 pm

You're right. A platform independent solution is hard. But what is possible by now is,
when fgcom is activated in fgfs , all radio sound could be sent to fgcom.
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Re: Different audio device for radio

Postby F-JJTH » Mon Aug 05, 2013 10:01 pm

Integration of FGCom into FG has been done, I'm just waiting the 2.12 release before asking James to add it into next branch.
Once this is done, I could start to look at multiple device per application.
Here on local I already worked on FGCom standalone side in order to have choice about device. I plan to add this feature for FGCom built in too, but as usual it require some time and skills...

With help from James I'm sure we could provide this feature for FG 3.0

Therefore, looking at OpenAL project it looks like the project is dead... openal.org is no longer accessible and http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/default.aspx too :?
Audio library world seems to be in bad period, PortAudio is no longer maintained, OpenAL seems to be dead. Last open source project available is OpenAL Soft http://kcat.strangesoft.net/openal.html

Regards,
Clément
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Re: Different audio device for radio

Postby mase » Mon Aug 05, 2013 10:34 pm

Sounds good!
And what do you think about routing all radio sounds through fgcom,
to have all these sounds via headset?
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Re: Different audio device for radio

Postby F-JJTH » Mon Aug 05, 2013 11:55 pm

Keep in mind that FGCom is not an "audio player" but an "asterisk client". Playing radio sound generated by FG into FGCom is not possible.
I would suggest to disable radio sound generated by FG when you use FGCom.
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Re: Different audio device for radio

Postby mase » Tue Aug 06, 2013 5:29 pm

Yes, I could disable radio sounds generated by fgfs.
But there are the station codes, ATIS etc.
They would also get disabled.
Maybe fgcom should provide an API to catch these
sounds from fgfs.
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Re: Different audio device for radio

Postby Hooray » Tue Aug 06, 2013 5:43 pm

Some core developers already talked about integrating FGCom and feeding all relevant audio through it, there's a summary of everything related to integrating FGCom at: http://wiki.flightgear.org/Integrating_FGCom
Please don't send support requests by PM, instead post your questions on the forum so that all users can contribute and benefit
Thanks & all the best,
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Re: Different audio device for radio

Postby F-JJTH » Tue Aug 06, 2013 6:18 pm

ATIS messages can be transmitted by FGCom, my local Asterisk server is already able to do that, but I don't know if the feature is expected...
Also morse code generated by VOR can be also transmitted by FGCom, here too my local Asterisk server do that, and again I don't know if the feature is expected... also, due to IAX limitation we can't have multiple call (i.e NAV1 & COM1) at same time, so this behaviour is not realistic since you need to make the choice to listen to morse code _or_ radio... so for now I don't plan to provide this feature.
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Re: Different audio device for radio

Postby mase » Sun Sep 24, 2017 1:09 pm

Maybe fgcom could open an other audio source, which can be linked like the user wants via
pulseaudio under Linux. I think, this can also be linked different on other platforms.
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