Elite: Dangerous, Single Monitor, and Audio Problems

To clarify now, I am NOT having audio problems with Elite: Dangerous. I was having crashes in the main menu, but haven’t seen one in a while (though I also haven’t spent much time there anymore, after setting up my settings). I think those crashes may have been related to the graphics driver I was on, so I upgraded to the latest NVIDIA driver (359.00 64-bit).

I picked up Elite: Dangerous and started playing it with a friend. The deeper I go into it, the more I find that it’s similar to EVE Online (which is not a bad thing). I rather much enjoy the similarities, because I’m able to pick up the game a lot faster. They are both amazingly beautiful and largely complex games. My friend suggested Netflix for longer runs, which I agreed was a good idea. However, the end setup was not what I expected.

Now I’m down to one monitor, because the TV that I was using decided to quit on me, and the parts to replace the old thing cost more than the TV is worth, especially since I’ve already revived it once. So for now that TV is sitting in pieces and I’m on a 5:4 until I can get a replacement.

I’ve set a laptop to my right (where my old monitor used to be) and I’m using Microsoft Garage Mouse Without Borders to control both PCs with one keyboard and one mouse. Very nice utility (when it works). It’s apparently supposed to synchronize clipboards, but that feature never works for me. To replace that feature, I’m using Ditto Clipboard Manager which can send and receive clipboard objects between multiple PCs.

Previously I had been using a Lenovo R61e for basic web browsing and YouTube streaming, which was working very well. Unfortunately when streaming Netflix it is prone to lock-ups and stuttering, primarily due to the single core Intel Celeron processor that the machine sports. So I brought out my Lenovo W520 (which I loathe, I may write about that later) since that has a nice quad-core Intel i7 that can multitask fairly well.

Initially I was playing audio through it’s external speakers, but this is inconvenient and makes a lot of noise (especially if others are trying to sleep). To solve this I was trying to use a simple RemAud client/server between my PCs, while using Virtual Audio Cable to redirect audio. This same exact setup worked wonderfully on the R61e, but for some reason I can’t get it to work at all on the W520. It has a lot of problems switching audio devices and then refuses to play back. Even when I got those working, RemAud kept erroring and refusing to send audio. After about 10-15 minutes playing with audio device settings, I was not able to get the problem resolved. About this same time, I remembered I had a 3.5mm cable sitting on my desk (giving me a huge “DUH” moment).

It wasn’t an 100% simple fix, but it was pretty close. Hooking one end to the laptop’s audio jack (it only has 1 combined mic/phone jack eww) and the other end to my desktop’s mic input, I simply opened VAC on my desktop and redirected the front panel mic’s input to my G930’s output. The connection worked fine, but the audio quality was complete garbage. I swapped it to my rear onboard sound card, and the quality immediately changed (for the better). So now I have a secondary PC hooked up with MWB, a processor powerful enough to multitask, and clear audio redirection. I’ve been running some tests via YouTube music videos for a while now and the audio quality is outstanding.

3.5mm cables are cheap and simple, but the job they do is incredible. I bought this one probably 8 years ago or so, and I use it all the time. You can pick up similar cables on Amazon for less than $5.00. I’ll probably pick up a few more just to have some around. In the meantime, back to exploring the universe.

Thanks for joining my adventures. I’m probably going to be trying out Voice Attack and seeing how well it works with E:D. A lot of people seem to like it. I also need to pick up a flight stick or two, because MAN is it hard to fly with a controller and/or a keyboard & mouse.

Fly safe pilots

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Filed under: Ghost,Imports - @ November 27, 2015 12:32

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