Here's to all the guys that like singing along or providing the audio to their friends and noting things, without all the synclag and other problems that occur.
You CAN connect an aux cable between your output and your input, HOWEVER, you must do so with some care. A simple stereo splitter with a TIP and RING split connection will suffice, or you can go another route and use a passive DI box.
First and most important!!!! When you use the splitter, connect your audio output jack to the TIP, not the RING. The TIP will clear a lot of noise and lift ground, the ring will add ground and you will lose your primary preamp at least until you reboot, or you may lose it completely... ...Not good.
Second, make sure your speakers are not double looping your signal, BEFORE YOU PLUG IN THE AUX. You'll need to go to control panel, then sound, and find the speakers, then double click them and go to Levels. Here you should only see one or two fader sliders. If they are L and R, you are alright. If one is speaker and the other is Mic, you are using an adaptive technology capable card, and you'll have to turn the mic fader all the way down. This will auto play through your mic, as if Listen is on. It's great for classrooms where some students have trouble hearing, but not for this playback.
BEFORE YOU PLAY ANYTHING BACK, check to make sure your speakers are about 75% or lower, this is considered electrically neutral on most systems, and if you use VLC to play back your tracks, you can increase the volume there to get better volume going back in.
Now play a track and turn it up in VLC until you get some volume showing in the sound panel's recording tab, where your mic shows up. There's a meter there. You want to be about halfway up when comfortable listening.
If you do this for a webcast meeting, here's where the splitter can be really helpful for choirs and musicians in training. Because a backing track will be on one side, and the vocal on the other. If you are performing to create a video later, you can record your casting with backing, which usually comes with a FLAG or SLATE that you can use to synchronise performances and video later, and the backing track can be removed easily in almost any video editor or DAW, without affecting the placement once it's aligned.
Finally, How do I know this works? I did it and it works just fine. I've done it about 50 times, then changed it up and used standard setup with a chap mic, no damage to anything in the system. The first time, however, I accidentally connected it to the ring... ...and most of my system wouldn't read the Realtek preamp driver system. It showed as nonfunctional. However, my Asio4All driver allowed me to utilize it in all of my asio capable apps, using the windows WDM backend. That's when I remembered... ...In TS the ring and Sleeve carry ground from the input not the output. Woops. I then checked which I used, and sure enough I'd put the darned thing in the Ring. Using the Tip, much of the noise was cancelled, but remember to make sure that it is just loud enough that you can listen comfortably without distortion in the playback (if you have a bad rip, you're stuck, can't help you). After that you can "Noiselessly" increase the volume in your playback app to bring in your volume to your webcast app.
If you really are helbent on hearing yourself too, get a cheap usb soundcard device off amazon and put your playback through that while you put your webcast app through your main speakers, and then tie your mic to the usb output. In this fashion, you simply play it into your webcast and you can then hear the music and yourself so you can match your tone better.
