kX Router

Overview

The kX Router applet is activated from the kX Mixer or from the kX Menu. This applet displays and lets you change how and where the audio streams from within the system are mapped to the 16 FXBusses in the kX DSP applet.

Audio Streams and the kX Router 

Software outputs include:

• Wave Left and Right (Windows Multimedia WinMM subsystem)
• DirectSound2D voices (hardware-accelerated)
• DirectSound3D voices (hardware-accelerated)
• AC3 voices (5+1)
• 16 MIDI channels
• 16 ASIO output channels

These software outputs are grouped as follows:

• Group 1. Wave Left/Right and DirectSound 2D voices (stereo or mono)
• Group 2. DirectSound3D and AC3 voices (they use only one mono output that is split by the driver to 2,4 or 6 channels);
• Group 3. 16 MIDI channels
• Group 4. 16 ASIO channels

These groups can have different routings, including 16 different routings for MIDI channels and 16 for ASIO channels (all controllable separately).

Each software voice is hardware-routed to 4 different FXBuses. These routings are called 'A', 'B', 'C', 'D', and each send amount can be individually adjusted. Send amounts are called 'send_a', 'send_b', 'send_c' and 'send_d'. Four additional FXBuses are added in the case of 10k2 cards ('E', 'F', 'G' and 'H'), for a total of 8. These amounts can be controlled by the sliders on the Fx Amounts page of the kX Mixer.

Note that Wave, DirectSound and MIDI routings require send_a and send_b to be reserved by the kX driver to perform stereo panning. Therefore, the user can control only the send_c and send_d amounts (although all 'routings' are controllable). For ASIO voices, all 4 amounts are controllable (8 for 10k2 cards) via the sliders in the kX ASIO control applet.

The default configuration allows panning of stereo sources using standard Windows / DirectX / Midi methods (handled internally by send_a and send_b), and to use send_c and send_d as 'FX Send Amounts'. Sends c and d are mapped to Reverb and Chorus by default, and controllable via MIDI Controllers as well as kX Mixer sliders.

Once a signal is modified by the send amounts and is routed to its target FX bus, it can then be controlled via kX DSP applet.

Using kX Router

The kX Router functions are very similar to the ASIO routing window functions, although there are no signal amount sliders present in the kX Router.

The streams in here are either mono or stereo. Wave and Soundfont Synth route to FXbus pairs 0/1 and 2/3 while the ac3 streams use single busses 4-8. All streams route to bus 13/14 by default, which acts like send/return for reverb and chorus effects in the default setup.

Tips and tricks

Router settings are unique for each installed soundcard. The currently selected soundcard is displayed in the lower right corner of the window. Card selection may be changed by clicking on the device name display box.