Maestro startup sound level

If I’m listening to some MP3’s and start Maestro, the sound levels change.
If I then quit Maestro the sound levels go back to “normal”.
I think this is a bug, but not really sure….
Maestro is actually really handy for my daughters for listening to the music she is trying to play, to get an idea of how it should sound.
They even input the scores themselves now!

What MP3 player are you using?

When Maestro starts it switches the 8-bit sound system to 8 channels, and adjusts the (8-bit) sound system volume using Sound_Volume (it looks like Maestro will avoid setting full volume, so that it can then boost the volume of individual notes above normal where necessary).

Due to the way the 8-bit channels are mixed, increasing the number of channels will effectively reduce the volume of each channel (same as on the Arc). So if your MP3 player is using the 8-bit sound system (unlikely) that might explain why the volume changes.

But I think the more likely cause is that the MP3 player is picking up on the change that was made via Sound_Volume. Both DigitalCD and PlayIt are known to do this, although I’m not really sure if Andre’s interpretation of the purpose of *Volume/Sound_Volume is correct My opinion is that it should only influence the 8-bit sound system, but I’m not sure if Acorn ever explicitly stated that was the case. The fact that the volume is specified as some funny value that interacts directly with the 8-bit log data doesn’t really make it suitable for use with linear sound systems (i.e. the 16-bit sound system)

The link to Sound_Volume is an option in DigitalCD. In the Choices window, section Mixing, tick “Ignore system Volume”.

The idea at the time, when RISC OS machines lacked any hardware global volume control, was by default to scale the DigitalCD volume by the Sound_Volume level. The first speakers which I had, set at the minimal non-distording volume (maybe 15-20% of its max volume), were far too loud so I had the default Sound_Volume at 25% and applications/games/demos which took it into account instead of playing at full volume where much appreciated.