2 sound cards

is it possible to have 2 sound cards in windows xp??? any help is appreciated.

punisher2k3

yea, but not running at the same time

are there any special settings i have to apply??? thanks for the help so far.

punisher2k3

to have just one running at a Time, do this: go into the control panel. goto performance and maintenance, then to System. Goto Hardware--->Device manager. Now pick the card you don't want to use, and right click and choose disable.

ill tell why i want to do this. i have a 4 channel surround sound card and surround speakers, but when i play it too loud the old man gets mad, so i want to use my onboard sound with speakers,so i can plug in headphones and so it wont bother my old man. hope this helps. now is there anything special i have to do??? thanks for the suggestion though.

punisher2k3

Sorry, Jeff7477, but you obviously don't know what you're talking about. If you look at my webpage you'll see that I have five sound cards running on one XP Pro SP1 computer: The on-board C-Media, one Soundblaster Audigy Platinum EX, one Zoltrix Nightingale Pro 6 and one Soundblaster Live! internal sound cards and finally one external USB sound card. And all this has been running for several months without any problems. I have SPDIF digital out from all cards except for the Soundblaster Live! (the original type that hasn't got SPDIF out), and I run five audio zones in my house from them. I use Media Center 9 from J.River for playback since it supports multi-zone. But you'll find a guide for that as well on my website.

Frank Castle, just select which card you want to use from the audio properties as your primary wave device. When the old man is sleeping, just select the onboard sound card for wave devices. I tried this out before and it works fine.

And if you want to do it more elegantly, take a look at Girder (www.girder.nl) and the plug-in "Change wave device" which can do it for you on a key combination, IR remote or just about any other way you want to.

yeh im pretty sure it is, a friend of mine had 3 in his at one point, he does music stuff i dunnoo... he had a sblive5.1, Maudio evo,and onboard 5.1. That worked for him, his board is an abit at7max2 btw and XP

you can run em all at the same time mastiff?

Yep. I can run music on all zones at the same time, or DVDs in the home theater and music on the rest of the zones. No problem.