Sound Card Selection for different Apps

[ccat]

Guys,

I have homeseer, Windows Media Player (with my mp3 collection) and Pandora all on the same PC (Vista).

I have 3 sound cards. Each sound card is connected to a different source input on a russound home audio system.

I use the homeseer speaker client to send all homeseer announcements to one sound card. I would like to send the output of WMP to the second sound card and the output of Pandora to the third sound card. However both WMP and Pandora both send their outputs to the sound card that is selected as the default windows sound card. And, from what I can tell you can't specify a different sound card to use in either app.

Is there a way to use the homeseer speaker client to direct the WMP or Pandora output to another sound card? Any other suggestions?

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

[completelyhis]

What OS are you running? I don't think you can do this w/Vista or 7, but I could be wrong. I think you can do it w/XP (but I could be wrong there too :-)

Ian

[mrhappy]

I'd concur with completelyhis, I'm 99% sure that for WMP (at least in XP) its fixed that it will be the system default sound card (whether there are any registry hacks for this I don't know), so at the least you could have WMP on the default, the speaker client on soundcard #1 to enable two 'zones'.

I have no experience with Pandora so I can't help there sorry.

Winamp however you can specify which soundcard to output onto.

[drozwood90]

Winamp however you can specify which soundcard to output onto.

that's how I do it.

--Dan

[Pete]

You can also utilize virtual cable as your primary and then move it "virtually" to a HW port.

http://software.muzychenko.net/eng/vac.htm

[completelyhis]

You can also utilize virtual cable as your primary and then move it "virtually" to a HW port.

http://software.muzychenko.net/eng/vac.htm

Pete,

I'm not sure if they updated it since then, but a year ago or so I tried using VAC w/win7 and HS and could not get it working...win7 was too much of a bully in how it controlled the various default audio devices.

Just FYI

Ian

[Pete]

Thank-you Ian.

I haven't given it a try with W7. I have had issues with W7 on my MM server sometimes not porting the sound to the optical interface (for DD 5.1); then having to play a bit with the sound drivers. With VM its kind of everything is Virtual and controlled in a different manner (to the point sometimes of lingering virtual devices that don't go away).

First time I used it was for a 1 U W2003 embedded NAS server with no sound card. Kind of Odd but I couldn't install any Multimedia anything without first having a sound card. This virtual audio cable program provided the means without a hardware card. With HS tried VAC with external USB sound devices to re-port where TTS was coming from.

[ccat]

Thanks. I'm running Vista. I took a look at WinAmp, but when I tried to download the winamp plugin (seeramp) the updater could not find the file to download, then I started getting concerned on whether or not the seeramp plugin would be integrated with the russound plugin like the itunes and media player plugins are. If seeramp was integrated with the russound plugin, then this would solve my problems, but when I looked at the seeramp message board it looked like it had not changed much since 2007 and I believe that was before the russound plugin was even available.

If I can get this working like I want, I'll be able to control both WMP and Pandora from my russound wall controllers in any room. All with the help of HS, and never have to leave a room to go to a PC to start any media players.

I'll try using virtual cable to route the WMP audio to the non-default sound card, If I can do that, then I can leave Pandora going to the default sound card and all should be good.

[ccat]

OK, after a looking at and trying Virtual Audio Cable (VAC), it almost does what I need. However it becomes an audio device and you have to set it as the default audio device so both applications send audio to VAC. So I took the next step...

I have upgraded to Windows 7 and I am now able to simply select a different soundcard in Windows Media Player. But the HS Media Player Plugin does not use the soundcard setting in Windows Media Player it uses the default windows sound card! arrghh.

[drozwood90]

I just use a custom script. I then control each Winamp Independently from each other, as you can load winamp with a command line flag that will allow each instance to respond to a different instance name (otherwise each one would respond to the same API calls).

If you want, I can help you out with this. It's pretty simple. Recently, as I was putting HS back together after the big re-install...I made a script that will create all the events and devices. You just run it, and everything is setup. Then you just need the actual HS script and the .exe files I made which allow the HS to Winamp control.

--Dan