Windows Vista / 7 Sound Card

Alexia · Mon 28 Sep, 2009 21.04

I do internet radio and at the moment on my WinXP laptop that works just fine as I can play music and talk over it and run the output to the encoder as "Stereo Mix". My question is can you do this on Vista and more importantly on Windows 7 as I am likely to jack this laptop in on its 4th birthday in the new year and upgrade to Windows 7. If not, is there any way around it on Vista / 7?

Cheers

Jovis · Mon 28 Sep, 2009 21.08

You certainly can on Vista, though you may need to enable it first in the sound options. Don't know about 7.

Neil Jones · Tue 29 Sep, 2009 22.27

Alexia wrote:I do internet radio and at the moment on my WinXP laptop that works just fine as I can play music and talk over it and run the output to the encoder as "Stereo Mix". My question is can you do this on Vista and more importantly on Windows 7 as I am likely to jack this laptop in on its 4th birthday in the new year and upgrade to Windows 7. If not, is there any way around it on Vista / 7?

This functionality will be a feature of the sound card, so if you can do it in XP you should be able to do it in Windows Vista and Windows 7, providing you use a driver for your hardware and not the generic one that Windows will load. The generic one will provide sound, granted, but it's useless for extra functionality such as what you want, and for that you'd need one from the manufacturer if the default one doesn't do it for you.

lukey · Tue 29 Sep, 2009 23.00

Although it is a feature of the sound card, there was a complete overhaul of the audio stack in Vista which can make particularly this kind of scenario a little fiddly - mainly the introduction of individual applications maintaining sessions with devices and services (ie. app A can record from mic, app B can record from stereo mix etc.), instead of a global playback/recording device. It was wrapped really quite nicely to make this as transparent/back-compat as possible, but without specific sound drivers can all go to piss. A common problem being some drivers not exposing stereo mix as a recording service by default, requiring a little extra prodding.

If you can get this working with Vista, then there should be no inherent problems with 7, but for potential driver issues.