I’ve read several topics about this but there doesn’t seem to be a clear, easy to understand answer.
I like to listen to music while I play some games, so I don’t want Exclusive Audio. I cannot find a way to disable this “feature” in Origin. The second I hit play, it enables exclusive audio playback.
Is there a way to disable this? If not, why not? Seems like a pretty huger oversight. I won’t buy this program if I can’t perform something as basic as “let other programs also play audio.”
Actually this is not an oversight. The whole purpose of Audirvana is to play high quality audio.
Audirvana takes/needs exclusive posession of your soundcard/DAC because it has to play bit-perfect or to be able to upsample. If you want to play games with sound while listening to music simply use another audio player. There are dozens of free alternatives that can do that for you.
Why buy a luxury car for doing shopping around the corner when you can walk there for free?
In Windows, disabling exclusive mode sends all music - after it has been processed by Audirvana (upsampling etc) - to the internal mixer by Windows.
Windows will then resample the sound to the bit depth and sample rate that is set in Windows Audio Settings (click Speaker symbol bottom right corner>Select a sound output (other speaker symbol)>More Volume Settings>then click the ‘>’ next to your output system - you will see the target sample rate under Output Settings>Format)
This means that if you chose to upsample to 192k but your Windows target sample rate is set to 44.1k playing anything will in the end play as 44.1k anyway.
Windows will resample all other sounds that are coming in from other apps as well, so they can be mixed into that same sample rate.
So yes it should be possible to let Audirvana play in non exclusive mode - if you accept that everything will play into that one sample rate set in Windows audio settings). But otoh, then a lot of users might not understand why Audirvana is no longer resampling to the sample rate they set in Audirvana. I trialed Roon the last 10 days, and there you can select to set the output in non exclusive mode but that only works for Wasapi. Asio will be in exclusive mode anyway. And when you switch from Wasapi non exclusive to Asio (exclusive) and back to Wasapi (non exclusive) then suddenly Roon no longer plays so Roon apparently forgot to release the output channels used by Asio. I told Roon support about it, but their forum is one bunch of victimblamers and other shrills. They don’t answer like : “yes we will look into this” in stead they avoid to come up with a real solution and answer : “restart roon” or “use exclusive mode only” which is stupid as you can select to disable exclusive mode there.
To conclude : me too I would like to have an option in audirvana to disable exclusive mode when using Wasapi (as Asio seems not possible - at least not in Roon) when using other programs. But in the mean time you can just stop playing music, and click the “unlock” symbol so your other program (game) can play sounds.
Happy New Year btw
Sometimes I want to play bit-perfect audio or whatever. Sometimes I want to play an old video game have some background music on. I would prefer to use one program for both.
Not giving people the option is an oversight, and making it look like they have the option due to horrible UI is a massive oversight. Guess I’ll take my money elsewhere. Shame.
im kinda in the same boat, tho i dont blame the UI for it, but yes its a oversight to just not implement it like for example the Qobuz software which offers exclusive and non exclusive mode, i dont think it takes that much afford
i hope audirvana looks into this @Antoine
it just makes audirvana better and more versatile, even if -all- people should prefer exclusive mode for “critical” listening
i also like to play background music and for example listen to a gamesound or a podcast at the same time and there is no way around non exclusive mode for this
or does audirvana expect us to use another player for this purpose?? massive oversight imo