Using headphones (onboard card) & HDMI Sound (gfx card) at the same time.

Ahleckz · 5 Jul 2011 at 17:38

Is it possible to use my headphones (which are 5.1, connected to the motherboards onboard sound) at the same time as having audio coming out of my TV which is connected to my graphics card through a HDMI cable?

Ideally, I'd like the headphones for my gaming sounds and the TV to play music at the same time. Or, whilst gaming on my TV I'd like to plug in my speakers to my computer and play music through that as it sounds much better.

james.miller · 5 Jul 2011 at 17:48

it can be done as long as you dont expect the outputs to be perfectly synced with eachother.

Virtual audio cable http://software.muzychenko.net/eng/vac.htm#trial

in a nut shell, you create a virtual audio device that you either set as the default playback device, or point your programs towards, then use the repeater functions to virtually hook that devices output up to the inputs on the motherboard and the hdmi audio respectively. I did exactly what you are trying to do - get my onboard and my ati gpu to output the same audio at the same time. It's a little trick to set up, and its not free, but they do have a trial version you can play around with though.

Ahleckz · 6 Jul 2011 at 11:30

Cheers, that looks complicated. I may just leave it.

Marsman · 6 Jul 2011 at 11:45

You can do that. What James mentioned, is what you would need to do if you want the same sound from the onboard audio as well as from HDMI. So if you were playing a game, and you wanted the game sound from both. If you want two separate sound sources through two different outputs, then you can do that. In this case, one source would be a game, and the other would be a media player. One would have to be set as Windows default, so that would be the one you will be using for gaming. You would need a media player that can select it's own audio device, so that would be using the other, in this case HDMI. Several are able to do this, I'm not sure if WMP can. Winamp can, which is what I use.

DarkMatter · 6 Jul 2011 at 12:38

it is fairly simple to have seperate audio sources playing on serpate devices.

So

HDMI -> Media player
Headphones ->Games

What is hard to do is

HDMI -> Games
Headphones -> Games

You have to have something like Virtual Audio Cable ( As mentioned above) which has a repeater function.