I’ve tried Window > Audio/MIDI Set-Up, but I can’t change anything because it is greyed-out and not clickable. I tried restarting the program to no avail.
I have the right speaker selected, but for some reason there were two entries of the speaker, so I figure I need to switch it to the other entry, but unlike Audacity, this seems impossible.
(Upset digression: I only needed about three features Audacity didn’t have and since this is the second time encountering this project-stopping problem with Ardor, I’m beginning to wonder if this is just the wrong program for me.)
Related: I started another project on my other computer with an experimental speaker which was essentially on loan, but after disconnecting that speaker it became impossible to use the program as it wouldn’t let me switch to any other speakers, killing a project I’d invested a week of my life into. It’s the same issue. Can’t get Ardor to do the most basic thing: to connect to the right speakers!!!
Update: I finally figured out (after I gave up on reading all the similar forum posts with this issue) that I had to hit the “Stop” button to change anything on the Audio/MIDI Set-Up page. (Why is this logical?!)
But then it turned out that both entries for my speakers didn’t work.
Eventually I figured out I had to select “Microsoft Sound Mapper” which was baffling (this isn’t something I’ve selected or used in any other program and obviously not the name of my speakers).
How are your speakers connected? Microsoft Sound Mapper is the built in consumer audio device stack on Windows, but most people would rather run ASIO for audio work on Windows.
To answer your question as to the STOP/START, it is in part a hold over from Jack, but also a thing to prevent accidental changes to items like sample rate as ideally once those are in they should remain set.
My speakers are plugged in via USB cable (I assume that one is just power); as well as an audio jack where the headphones slot is on the side of my PC.
For pro-audio and music creation workflows, sample rate is a fundamental parameter that should never change without deliberate and careful consideration by the user.
What speakers are these? This sounds like you are pulling power from USB and audio signal is going over headphones, in which case it would be your built in audio. But I don’t know of many/any speakers that work like this, most would pull power from the wall, and then you give audio over usb or analog headphone jack, not both.
And to go farther on what Paul was mentioning, imagine if your project was recorded at one sample rate, then you went to record a new track and it changed sample rate. All the other tracks would now sound either slow or fast and pitched in a similar fashion while your recorded track would be fine, but now a single sample rate won’t fix it, you need to resample all the files at the wrong rate to fix it.
Or a simpler possibility, you have a project recorded at a sample rate of 48k but it got changed to 44.1k. Now all your music is slightly to fast and slightly pitched down as you listen to it. Or vice versa if going from 44.1 to 48k. These are actually surprisingly common occurrences when consumer applications change the sample rate on DAWs on occasion for instance.