Two Soundcards

[Glader]

Hi everyone, I've google'd around to the best of my abilitys to find some more information on this subject but it's quite scarce.

Yesterday I connected the audio out on my secondary computer to the mic/line in on my Sound Blaster card in my main computer. I did this simply because I wanted to hear what's going on on both my computers. This worked perfectly apart from one thing: I could no longer have my microphone plugged in at the same time.

This led me to activating the on-board soundcard which is a VIA1708S according to Asus.

Now that I had two sound cards activated I wanted the following:

two separate line-in's
two front speaker/headphone out's.

Unfortunately both the line-in and mic in on the VIA card crackle like there's no tomorrow so unless someone has a better idea I'm going to have to buy a USB microphone.

And now to the primary problem:

When I have the speakers connected to the on-board VIA card and my headphone connected to the SoundBlaster card I CAN listen to music from both my primary and secondary computer in my headphones and play the test tunes on my speakers at the same time, so obviously it is possible for the computer to ouput sound to both the built-in and add-on soundcard at the same time.

So: How do I enable dual streaming/output permanently? At the moment I can only output a stream to one card and test the hardware on the other.

*EDIT* I have now managed to get this far:
The setup is just like before:
server out to soundblaster in
headphones to soundblaster out
speakers to VIA out.

When playing sounds on the server I hear it on my headphones, but depending on which "Speakers" I set to default device I can output the main computers sound to either the speakers or the headphones.

Halfway there I guess, anyone care to help?


Thanks.

 

[wullthebull]

never heard of using 2 sound cards as in the sound config you will only have one device listed .

 

[Glader]

Actually the device manager lists both the PCI and on-board cards:

SB Audigy
VIA High Definition Audio

 

[stormy13]

never heard of using 2 sound cards as in the sound config you will only have one device listed .

As long as the cards are different makes to avoid driver conflicts (Creative with Creative, etc), you can have as many as slots allow.

Glader to get to what you want to do you need to select which device is the default for playback and recording (sounds like you have done this so far); then in the program(s) you are using if they allow it, set the program to use whichever deviec is desired.