Hi,
I am running PsychoPy 2024.1.5 on Windows 10. The Creative Sound Blaster Audigy Rx is a low-latency PCIe sound card (recommended, for example, by EyeLink for use with their eye tracker). The correct drivers are installed (I received a download link from Creative). The card is connected to stereo (2.0) speakers. When running a PsychoPy program that uses the Sound class with ‘ptb’, ‘pyo’, or ‘sounddevice’ as the chosen audio library, no sound comes out of the speakers. There are no error messages. The problem is specific to a combination of the sound card and these audio libraries, since:
(1) using a different sound device: these audio libraries produce sound when the speakers are instead connected to the sound device that is on the motherboard, or to a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy Fx V2 PCIe card (which does not have low latency);
(2) using a different audio library: running a PsychoPy program that uses the Sound module with ‘pygame’ as the chosen audio library, sound is played via the Audigy Rx.
The ‘pygame’ audio library unfortunately has terrible audio latency. The solution I have found is to abandon the Sound class and instead use the ‘winsound’ library that is part of the standard Python installation (winsound — Sound-playing interface for Windows — Python 3.13.3 documentation). This is giving me low latencies (e.g. 11.4 +/- 0.3 ms when playing a tone, as opposed to an audio file, and when sending TTLs via the parallel port). So using ‘winsound’ works for me, but I thought I’d raise this issue all the same in case it can be fixed before other people encounter it.
Richard