Etienne Dechamps

"Audio enhancements" refers to all APOs. If you uncheck that, it will disable all APOs, including Equalizer APO. If you want to make sure only Equalizer APO is active, as opposed to any other APO bundled with the driver, you can uncheck the "use original APO" option in the Equalizer APO Configurator.

I can't use WDM or ASAPI because they are limited to 2 speakers. WASAPI obviously supports more than 2 channels - people use WASAPI for 5.1/7.1 all the time, including myself. I've also witnessed it working with exotically high channel counts, such as 10 output channels. MME and DirectSound use WASAPI internally, so if WASAPI doesn't provide >2 channels then it would be impossible for MME/DS to use more than 2 channels. Same goes for WDM-KS, which obviously has to support more than 2 channels because...

Equalizer APO will not do this unless it's explicitly told to in the config file. If it goes away when you turn off enhancements, it most likely means it's another APO doing it, perhaps the one that came with the driver. If you re-install Equalizer APO on the device with "use original APO" unchecked, I expect this will solve the problem.

The sound card came with software and a drver. Do I need any of their software or driver. As far as Equalizer APO is concerned, it doesn't matter which driver you use. That said, I would always recommend sticking to Microsoft drivers if you have no need for the (potential) extra features in the manufacturer-provided one, as Microsoft drivers tend to be more reliable.

That's right. The VST running in the Editor is not actually doing anything, it's the one running in the APO that counts. Sadly, there is no way to interact with the VST instance running inside the APO - it's a "set and forget" kind of thing.

What do you mean exactly by "it can't detect an input"? If you are saying it doesn't see any audio passing through when you run it in the Editor, that's normal. The VST Instance running in the Editor doesn't actually process any signal. Another instance of the VST runs in the actual APO itself and that one will process the actual audio.

Unfortunately the developer hasn't commented exactly why this disabling audio enhancements happens. In my experience this is usually caused by the APO crashing, failing to initialize, or generally misbehaving. Windows has an automated recovery mechanism where it will automatically disable APOs if that happens repeatedly. Maybe the Equalizer APO log would have information as to why it's having trouble.

You can use an Include command to transfer control to another file, and put all your filters in that other file. Then, you can simply turn the Include command on/off to enable and disable all the filters at once.