Stereo-Mix Blues - please help this guitar player!

I've got a problem....I can listen to music just fine. I can also play my guitar through my sound card's "line-in" and hear it thru the headphones plugged into the computer. All good, right? Nope!

Yet, when I want to play the guitar, acompanied by some internet blues radio station for fun/practice, I cannot record my noodlings. Apparently, Windows 7 is not allowing "Stereo-Mix" to work on my computer. I've tried several sound recording suites and all of them cannot get the "Stereo-Mix" option going - only my "line-in" guitar noise gets recorded. The "Stereo-Mix" option appears right below my "line-in" system sounds settings, but says it's "CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE".

What, did Windows 7 send it on vacation?

Curiously, there was absolutely no problem until I "upgraded" from WinXP.....There has to be a way to get back this capability!?! It's frustrating!! There must be a fix.

I have an integrated sound card - a VIA VT 1708B on an Asus P5KPL-CM mobo.

And, yes I've tried "enabling" the stereo-mix to no avail, clicked every button imaginable, and I've updated my VIA on board sound wafer with VIA's latest 2009 driver updates....still cant record my guitar sound with music playing over the internet, or from my CD drive.....sucks!

Grrrrr..............Win 7!

There is a chance an updated Via driver from the Asus web site will solve it.

More likely, you will have to buy a new sound card that supports "stereo mix" recording.

That functionality has been removed from many Windows 7 audio drivers. It disappeared from my system also.

If you need a new sound card, you will have to research which ones are KNOWN to support stereo mix in Windows 7. I have not yet seen such a list, but I don't think they are common. Hit google and hope.

This is probably a deliberate move by Microsoft and sound card manufacturers to appease certain organizations. My opinion only--why else would they remove it?

Corpsecrank:

The point is that many sound cards that had "stereo mix" or "what you hear" as choices in the control panel after showing all disabled and disconnected simply do not offer that choice in Windows 7. If you know of a solution for that, please post it.

Seems that Asus has beaten VIA to the punch and released a newer driver for the VIA VT1708B onboard sound VIA VT 1708B on an Asus P5KPL-CM mobo. Goto Asus' website and download this new driver [VIA only has the .7300 version for some reason]. After clicking a few setting on the sound manager for windows, I was able to get the stereo mix going. I can now stream audio, play guitar, and record the whole combined cacophony together. All is good again!

ASUSTeK Computer Inc.

Version 6.0.1.7400 Description VIA Audio Driver V6.0.1.7400 for Windows 32/64bit XP & 32/64bit Vista & 32/64bit Windows 7.

There are many that do not have the System Mixer in Vista/Windows 7. DRM is probably one reasons some sound vendors have removed it. My Acer laptop's Realtek drivers do not have it. My Intel motherboard's SigmaTel did not have it but the latest Vista driver restored it. This is probably the #1 audio complaint on the Dell users forum.

The way sound is handled was changed in Vista over older OS' and that is when the problems started as vendors had to rewrite their drivers.

As far as sound cards that do have the System Mixer (Soundblaster calls it "what you hear") the PCI "HT Omega Striker 7.1" sound card does have the system mixer in all OS' including Win 7 32 and 64 bit. SOME of the SoundBlaster's have it and some do not. I was researching a SoundBlaster Audigy SE problem for a client and found out it depends on the driver version for this model - the latest Vista driver (at the time - about 8 months ago) added Sound Enhancements (e.g reverb) but removed the What You Hear but the previous version had the What You Hear but not sound enhancements - my client wanted both but settled for the What You Hear.

Yes, on my old Computer [win XP] I have Soundblaster Audigy SE "Live" card, and use Creative's Media player's record function set to "what U hear". It' works great.

On my Windows 7 equipped computer, Creative's Media player's record function set to " ".........meaning nothing is displayed where the text should be, but it works! Since I have my onboard sound wafer set to "stereo-mix" as default, perhaps that is why the text is blank in the Creative recorder....? Or, they just never got round to updating the code!?!

Weird, but I'll take what I can get!