Sound Keeper - prevents digital audio SPDIF or HDMI from “falling asleep”

If you have ever used digital audio outputs (SPDIF or HDMI), you probably encountered a problem when the speakers “fell asleep” during silence, after which the beginning of the next sound was cut off because acoustics needed time to “wake up” and initialization after sleep. This is very annoying. If you have never had such a problem, then you are lucky with the driver. If the problem takes place - it is solved by continuous reproduction of absolute silence. A crutch, but this is the only available way to force the driver not to turn off the digital audio output.

Previously, for these purposes there was one program called SPDIF Keep Alive. But in my opinion, it is too heavy for solving such a simple task: it requires the presence of the .NET framework, it spends too much memory and CPU time. Therefore, I wrote a new problem-solving program in C ++.

Introducing Sound Keeper v1.0

The program uses the modern sound subsystem WASAPI, therefore it will work only on Windows 7 and newer. Outwardly, Sound Keeper does not manifest itself and works fully automatically: it finds all the digital outputs (SPDIF or HDMI) and prevents them from falling asleep. If a new digital output appears during operation of the program (for example, if you connected your computer via HDMI to a TV), this will be processed correctly, and no program restart is required. To disable Sound Keeper, you must either turn off the sound in the mixer for this program (after which Sound Keeper will close automatically), or simply kill the soundkeeper.exe process. To automatically download the program with the system, simply copy the executable file soundkeeper.exe to the Startup directory in the Start menu. In future versions, it is possible that an icon will be added to the notification area with the possibility of manual control and the function to close the application from a simple menu.
')
Download: soundkeeper.zip (11KB).

Sound Keeper vs. SPDIF Keep Alive

	Sound Keeper v1.0	SPDIF Keep Alive v1.2
Full automatic:	Yes	Not
Multiple output support:	Yes	Not
GUI:	Not	there is
Requires .NET:	Not	Requires
The size of the .exe file:	17KB	668KB
CPU consumption (on Intel Core i5 4460):	0.004%	0.06%
RAM consumption (Private Working Set):	1636KB	13704KB

Thanks for attention

I hope this program is useful to someone else. I will be glad to your feedback.