Sound Keeper - prevents "falling asleep" digital audio outputs SPDIF or HDMI

If you have ever used digital audio outputs (SPDIF or HDMI), you probably encountered a problem when the acoustics “fell asleep” during silence, after which the beginning of the next sound was cut off because the acoustics needed time to “wake up” and initialization after sleep. This is very annoying. If you have never had such a problem, then you're in luck 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 make the driver not 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 to solve such a simple task: it requires the presence of the .NET framework, it consumes too much memory and processor time. Therefore, I wrote a new program in C ++ to solve the problem.

Introducing Sound Keeper v1.0

The program uses the modern sound subsystem WASAPI, therefore, it will work only on Windows 7 and newer. Sound Keeper does not manifest itself in any way and works completely automatically: it finds all digital outputs (SPDIF or HDMI) and prevents them from falling asleep. If during the operation of the program a new digital output appears (for example, if you connected the computer via HDMI to the TV) - this will be processed correctly, restarting the program is not required. To disable Sound Keeper, you must either turn off the sound in the mixer for this program (after which Sound Keeper will automatically close), or just kill the soundkeeper.exe process. To automatically download a program with the system, simply copy the soundkeeper.exe executable file to the Startup directory on the Start menu. In future versions, perhaps

Download: soundkeeper.zip (11KB).

Sound Keeper vs. SPDIF Keep Alive

	Sound Keeper v1.0	SPDIF Keep Alive v1.2
Full automatic:	Yes	Not
Support multiple outputs:	Yes	Not
GUI:	Not	there is
Requires .NET:	Not	Requires
EXE file size:	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 would be glad to hear your feedback.