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I often play games on the MCE HTPC using my headphones but my wife would like to listen to Shoutcast while I'm wasting my life away. My dream sound card would support multiple sound "paths" so I could output game audio to my headphones while sending Winamp/iTunes audio to my home theater receiver. As a nice-to-have, Dolby Digital Live to encode game audio to the receiver when wifey's not home!M-Audio Delta cards can split sound paths but only stereo signals (no 5.1) and they aren't supported by MCE. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!
Follow Ups:
My plan is to implement a usb-audio-DAC for my PCM music data path while using the motherboard's on-board S/PDIF out for all 5.1 passthru digital for DD/DTS audio data.I'm not interested in gaming, so I can't comment on it, but my scenario described above shouldn't have any problem doing audio output to both at the same time.
Careful, if you use one of those USB sound cards it will disable your "regular" sound source (be in onboard audio or a PCI card). The reason for this is the same reason I'm having difficulty with my scenario, in that Windows is not generally designed to support multiple sound output streams at once and that you need prosumer type cards from M-Audio and other companies to accomplish the feat. Unfortunately so far I haven't been able to find one that both works with MCE (none of the M-Audio stuff does) and supports 5+.1 as well as stereo (the M-Audio cards output multiple stereo signals but no 5+.1).
For me that won't be a problem, as I'm using linux as an OS.I'm not really tring to run two outputs at the same time though, just defining where specific outputs go (i.e. DD/DTS go to a different output device than PCM).
In my case I'm just routing a data stream to the usb port, not a sound card.
It turns out multiple sound paths are supported by any Intel High Definition Audio-compatible chipset, e.g. pretty much every modern post-AC97 chipset. Time for a new sound card!
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