All three additions here are about making the Directional Sound readout trustworthy for
someone who cannot rely on their ears to place a sound.
New
Take sound from one app. A picker under Sound lists everything currently playing and
lets you follow just one of them. Windows hands over that process's audio directly, so a
notification or a song playing alongside your game cannot pull the lights around.
This matters more than it sounds. If you run any kind of hearing correction, equalizer or
per-ear balance tool, capturing your PC as a whole captures that tool's output, with your
correction already applied. The panning a game put into its audio has been flattened by
then and no amount of processing here can recover it. Pointing this at the game instead
takes its stream before anything else touches it.
Even out left and right. If one side of your headphones runs far louder than the other,
every sound reads as coming from that side. This watches the long-run level of each channel
and cancels the difference, leaving only the moment-to-moment changes that actually carry
direction. It reports what it measured in decibels, and there is a Measure again button for
after you change a volume setting. A manual nudge is there for anything the automatic side
cannot know about; it shifts the answer rather than turning a channel up, so nothing gets
amplified into the picture that was not there before.
Directional sound as an overlay. It can now sit on top of whatever effect you are
already running, at whatever strength you choose. Silence leaves the effect underneath
completely untouched, so the lights only change when there is something to point at. It
uses the colours and spot width you saved under the Directional Sound effect itself.
Changed
- Direction is worked out in decibels rather than as a ratio between the two channels. The
old form ran out of room almost immediately, so any real correction pushed the answer flat
against one edge and every sound read as hard left or hard right. Panning now moves the
spot proportionally, with 20 dB of separation counting as fully to one side. - The Sound settings appear whenever anything is listening, including when only the overlay
is on, instead of only on the effect that owns them.
Fixed
- The app picker listed nothing. It asked each audio session whether it was the system
sounds session, and on at least some machines every session answers yes to that, so the
whole list was discarded.
Install
Download SickRGB.exe below and run it. One file, .NET runtime bundled, no installer and no
administrator rights.
Using a Turtle Beach or ROCCAT keyboard? Close its own software first, or it will fight for
control of the lighting.
Licence
SickRGB is under
PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0:
free for any noncommercial purpose, not for selling.