Dose anyone know why Reason affects Youtube and other audio on my computer?

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edx500
Posts: 50
Joined: 19 Jan 2015

24 Feb 2015

Hi everybody!
Haven't been posting a whole lot lately, but I wanted to mention a problem I've had more than once these last few years.
That is when I have Reason running it seems to disable the audio on Youtube AND other audio players like Winamp and Windows Media Player. Now I often learn new songs by setting up a piano or something in Reason and then playing along with Youtube or the mp3 on WinAmp. I get  chord progressions and key phrasing this way.
Now for a long time I wasn't having 
too much trouble with this. Even after building a new computer last year, switching to Windows8 and going 64 bit It was all working okay......some glitches, but usually fixable.
Now for the last month or two I haven't been able to play any other audio while reason is running.

I'm hoping someone can help me out here.

I'm using an AMD chipset with 16 Gbs of RAM and Windows8. The only thing I've tried differently was a USB midi cable in place of my old Tascam interface. I also have use Balance for Audio I-O.

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Raveshaper
Posts: 1089
Joined: 16 Jan 2015

24 Feb 2015

If you are running ASIO4All or any other ASIO audio driver, this will disable audio playback in other programs. On my machine running Windows 7, I can only share audio output with other programs by selecting the main DX driver for my motherboard's onboard sound. This could be the culprit.
:reason: :ignition: :re: :refillpacker: Enhanced by DataBridge v5

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Jagwah
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24 Feb 2015

QwaizanG wrote:If you are running ASIO4All or any other ASIO audio driver, this will disable audio playback in other programs.
ASIO4ALL did this on my system too, sounds like the problem if the OP is using it. I disabled mine because I don't need it.

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ScuzzyEye
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25 Feb 2015

I will agree that ASIO is likely the problem, but it's not universally true that using ASIO disables the rest of Windows sounds. With my Focusrite I can even record other Windows sounds while running Reason with the ASIO driver. It just depends on how the audio interface maker wrote their drivers.

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Kategra
Posts: 327
Joined: 18 Jan 2015

25 Feb 2015

ScuzzyEye wrote:I will agree that ASIO is likely the problem, but it's not universally true that using ASIO disables the rest of Windows sounds. With my Focusrite I can even record other Windows sounds while running Reason with the ASIO driver. It just depends on how the audio interface maker wrote their drivers.
Same with my RME Fireface, it can have Reason, Youtube, Winamp and Videolan playing at same time.
Before the RME, I had an EMU-0204 and it had the same limitation as OP's Tascam.

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submonsterz
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Joined: 07 Feb 2015

25 Feb 2015

ScuzzyEye wrote:I will agree that ASIO is likely the problem, but it's not universally true that using ASIO disables the rest of Windows sounds. With my Focusrite I can even record other Windows sounds while running Reason with the ASIO driver. It just depends on how the audio interface maker wrote their drivers.
Kategra wrote:
Same with my RME Fireface, it can have Reason, Youtube, Winamp and Videolan playing at same time.
Before the RME, I had an EMU-0204 and it had the same limitation as OP's Tascam.
I use an emu 18/20 and in another machine an emu 04/04 one on xp and other on win 7 machine and both do all of the above on asio driver. so no idea why the emu 02/02 did not work for you ?.

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Exowildebeest
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Joined: 16 Jan 2015

25 Feb 2015

ScuzzyEye wrote:I will agree that ASIO is likely the problem, but it's not universally true that using ASIO disables the rest of Windows sounds. With my Focusrite I can even record other Windows sounds while running Reason with the ASIO driver. It just depends on how the audio interface maker wrote their drivers.
True - Focusrite here too - but only if the system default samplerate is the same as what Reason is running. So when I want to record stuff in Reason using Focusrite's loopback feature, say sampling from a movie, I have to change my Reason samplerate from 48 to 44.1.

Good enough though. Some drivers, in fact many I've used in the past, including ASIO4ALL if I remember correctly, can handle only 1 audio stream. Annoying. But if you really need this, switching to DirectX/MME drivers or whatever it's called will fix it, those do handle multiple audio streams, at the cost of latency and/or performance.

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DeltaHotelVictory
Posts: 69
Joined: 18 Jan 2015

25 Feb 2015

Exowildebeest is right. About a year ago, I suddenly couldn't play Reason audio and other Windows sounds simultaneously anymore. It took a while for me to figure out that I changed the sample rate in Reason a few days before. It turned out that the sample rate in Reason needs to be the same as the Windows audio (most likely 44.1 khz).

I don't even think there is a good reason to work at a higher sample rate than 44.1 khz. Unless of course you work with samples in a higher sample rate such as 48 khz or 96 khz and do not want Reason to convert those into 44.1 khz.

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edx500
Posts: 50
Joined: 19 Jan 2015

25 Feb 2015

Thanks for all the responses.

So I just tried changing the sample rate and was able to fix the glitch. Reason, Youtube, and Winamp are all currently playing together. I'm still on ASIO so apparently that wasn't the issue for me.

Again thanks for the help.

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Grinder One
Posts: 94
Joined: 21 Jan 2015

25 Feb 2015

Yea, it's AsioV2 that does it for me. If I switch to creative Asio(sound blaster) which I do when I want youtube/vlc or any other media to run alongside, then it's fine. But I switch back to V2 for serious production. It's exactly the same when I use Reaper DAW, so it's definatly AsioV2.

Problem:
When running an audio device through ASIO4ALL, there is no sound from other applications.

Reason:
The majority of audio devices are essentially "Single Client". The ability for simultaneous use from multiple applications is added by Windows through software mixing inside the Windows audio stack.
This, and the occasional need to add even more processing (e.g. resampling) adds a non-trivial amount of latency.
Since ASIO4ALL was designed to reduce latency, it accesses the audio device in the most direct way possible, bypassing all the software mixing otherwise happening inside the Windows audio stack.
As a side effect, this exposes single client audio devices as what they actually are.

Solution:
There currently is no complete solution.
Most problems can be overcome, however, by setting your ASIO host application to "Release ASIO driver in the background" or any similarly named option your host may offer.
If, on the other hand, you want to e.g. "sing along" a video on YouTube - or anything similar, there is a product called "Virtual Audio Cable" allowing you to route audio from other applications into the audio inputs of ASIO4ALL.

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edx500
Posts: 50
Joined: 19 Jan 2015

25 Feb 2015

That virtual audio cable sounds interesting. I think I'll take a look.

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submonsterz
Posts: 989
Joined: 07 Feb 2015

25 Feb 2015

Since windows 7 all the having to match the sample rates in windows and you're audio devices started to happen I'd take a stab at thinking you're all working on win 7 and up for these issues to be arising. I'd say it's a windows thing a not so good one at that . But matched rates fixes all. Was one of the things that pissed me off no end when I jumped up from win xp to win 7 . ....

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Raveshaper
Posts: 1089
Joined: 16 Jan 2015

25 Feb 2015

If you are on Mac, I suggest looking into Eigen-D from Eigenlabs. It's a free midi and audio virtual patch bay utility.
:reason: :ignition: :re: :refillpacker: Enhanced by DataBridge v5

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SteveDiverse
Posts: 108
Joined: 15 Jan 2015

26 Feb 2015

in reason preferences, select 'play in background'
:reason: :reload: :record: :ignition: :refill: :re: | :rt: FTW

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