Windows 7 wtf



  • I'm a long-time Linux and Mac user, recently thrust into the world of Win 7. I feel like such a noob.  I've got a small wtf here I absolutely cannot figure out... 

    If I have headphones plugged in and have music going, then say I get an IM, or any sort of alert with a sound is raised, the music is routed to the *external* speakers and the alert is routed to the headphones.  

    Basically I'm annoying the hell out of my coworkers if I try to listen to music because i get a lot of alerts (email, a couple of IM clients and a system monitor, all pretty chatty)

     How on earth do I fix this?



  • @CaptainCaveman said:

    I'm a long-time Linux and Mac user, recently thrust into the world of Win 7. I feel like such a noob.  I've got a small wtf here I absolutely cannot figure out... 

    If I have headphones plugged in and have music going, then say I get an IM, or any sort of alert with a sound is raised, the music is routed to the external speakers and the alert is routed to the headphones.  

    Basically I'm annoying the hell out of my coworkers if I try to listen to music because i get a lot of alerts (email, a couple of IM clients and a system monitor, all pretty chatty)

     How on earth do I fix this?

    WTF.

    Uninstall whatever buggy-ass broken sound driver came with the hardware, and install the Windows default sound driver, which works.

    And to dissuade any fears, that is *not* normal Windows 7 behavior. A program can manually switch its sound output to a different device than the default, but the OS itself is always supposed to be using the default sound output device. (Thus the name "default sound output device".)



  •  well, i would but it's a company laptop and i don't have admin rights.  I may talk to our admin dude and see if he can figure something out.



  • @CaptainCaveman said:

     well, i would but it's a company laptop and i don't have admin rights.  I may talk to our admin dude and see if he can figure something out.

    Ugh quit.

    ... that aside, what software are you using to play the music? Does it have the ability to select a custom sound output device? You could try selecting "Headphones" instead of "System Default" and see if that solves the problem... but it still strikes me as a driver issue.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Ugh quit.
     

     but i like this job!

    lets see i've tried VLC, winamp, iTunes and win media player with the same results for all.  There's a setting I got to by right-clicking the volume control thingy in the task bar that allows you to assign a default output device.  I tried disabling the speakers but that killed sound to everything, and then i tried setting the headphones as the default but that didn't change any behavior that I can tell.



  •  You already tried rummaging through the sound card's preferences?



  • @dhromed said:

     You already tried rummaging through the sound card's preferences?

     

     I would if i knew how to get there....  

     



  • Right click the speaker in the tray, go to playback devices. Select your speakers, then from the dropdown button down by the properties button in the bottom right make sure both set default and set default communications device are set.


  • Garbage Person

    What does Windows call your audio device? Chances are if it's anything other than "Realtek HD Audio" or "Intel HD Audio" (those two drivers cover prettymuch everything in current use), your laptop manufacturer is made of dicks and has installed some stupid fucking driver that's responsible. If it's either of those things, they've STILL installed a shitty driver and not even bothered to change the display name.

    If, on the outside chance, it's a Creative chip - you're probably fucked. This sounds just like something one of their standard drivers would do. However, as far as I'm aware, nobody buys their shit anymore (because it's shit.)



  • It's more than likely just that instant messengers default to what looks like a headset, whereas everything else defaults to the "best" speaker attached to the system.



    Silly way to do it. What I want to know is why no OS out there I've seen has a node-based audio manager. Inputs along one edge, applications along another, outputs along the other, your custom mixing (with volume, pan, combine, convert to mono, rever, etc) in between. Unreal 3 does this in the form of Sound Cues and it works really nicely, to have it built into an OS would be incredible and a million times better than the fairly hard to use an inflexible junk we're saddled with at the moment.



  • @nexekho said:

    It's more than likely just that instant messengers default to what looks like a headset, whereas everything else defaults to the "best" speaker attached to the system.

    Shitty ones might. I didn't think of asking what IM program it is.

    BTW, Windows doesn't have a concept of "best" device (in general, or for a specific purpose.) It only has "default" device.

    @nexekho said:

    Silly way to do it. What I want to know is why no OS out there I've seen has a node-based audio manager. Inputs along one edge, applications along another, outputs along the other, your custom mixing (with volume, pan, combine, convert to mono, rever, etc) in between. Unreal 3 does this in the form of Sound Cues and it works really nicely, to have it built into an OS would be incredible and a million times better than the fairly hard to use an inflexible junk we're saddled with at the moment.

    99.9% of users would never touch the thing. I'm happy with Vista/Windows 7's volume mixer.

    EDIT: Oh BTW, I love when people propose a silly "throw it against the wall and see if it sticks" idea, then immediately in the next paragraph criticize their OWN IDEA even though there's zero evidence it's actually what's happening. That's some awesome forum postery there.


  • Garbage Person

    @nexekho said:

    What I want to know is why no OS out there I've seen has a node-based audio manager. Inputs along one edge, applications along another, outputs along the other, your custom mixing (with volume, pan, combine, convert to mono, rever, etc) in between. Unreal 3 does this in the form of Sound Cues and it works really nicely, to have it built into an OS would be incredible and a million times better than the fairly hard to use an inflexible junk we're saddled with at the moment.
    Because the 100 of us who would ever use it are both not worth the developer time, and not worth the support effort when 100,000 idiots all screw their shit up by messing with it.

    Personally, I'd kill for it. If it could be done on Linux without ruining everything else, I'd be all over it - but Linux users, in their infinite wisdom, have two or more competing sound systems with different control schemes - which often need to be installed side-by-side for application compatibility. If they made this hypothetical one, there would be three, and no apps would support the "good one".

     

    Additionally, knowing the audio driver environment in Windows, it would inevitably be rendered useless by the worthless dickfaces writing audio drivers. 



  • EDIT: Oh BTW, I love when people propose a silly "throw it against the wall and see if it sticks" idea, then immediately in the next paragraph criticize their OWN IDEA even though there's zero evidence it's actually what's happening. That's some awesome forum postery there.

    Err, what? Windows 7 has two default devices - one for communications, one for everything else. I just said the same thing in two different ways. For a while, Skype kept trying to play alerts and such through my mixing setup because the audio drivers thought it looked like a "communication device". On my laptop it repeatedly switches this to the inbuilt speakers/microphone without asking using the standard Microsoft drivers. I can see where they were going with two defaults, but it's just a pain due to bad implementation.


  • Garbage Person

    @nexekho said:

    Err, what? Windows 7 has two default devices - one for communications, one for everything else.
    No it doesn't.

    [img]http://pic.phyrefile.com/e/ey/eyemwing/2011/03/05/audio.png[/img]

    Windows has several CLASSES of output device - including headsets, "normal" outputs, and digital outputs.  Anything that is identified by the audio driver as a headset is automatically recipient of sounds produced by what Microsoft calls "Communication" applications - including Skype. If your audio driver includes a particularly idiotic auto-sensing routine for its analog jacks (and ALL auto-sensing routines are idiotic), it probably decided your mixer was a pair of headphones and told Windows about it. So oddly enough, you were mostly correct.  This feature is supposed to be invoked by USB headsets, but can of course be invoked by any audio driver. Those of us with well-behaved drivers never notice unless we have USB headsets (because analog headsets on a well-behaved driver will get the audio from the primary output anyway and the other features of communications mode affect other applications, regardless of device) 

     To restate my earlier point: All audio drivers except bare-bones reference drivers are absolute GARBAGE.


  • Garbage Person

    @Weng said:

    No it doesn't.
    Dammit, I just realized what you actually said and wanted to edit that, but Cuntmunity Server won't let me.

    So pretend I was a bit less of a dick, because I'm agreeing with you and adding information instead of calling you an idiot and informing you.





  • @nexekho said:

    Two defaults.

    You bastard, I actually got out of bed to check that. My computer doesn't have that pull-down... possibly because my headset is USB? Well, either way, I stand corrected. Make sure you never listen to anything I say.

    BTW: USB headsets work awesometastic, about 50,000 times better than sound card port detection shit.



  • If your device already is one default or the other the pulldown turns into a button or disappears altogether.



  • @CaptainCaveman said:

    If I have headphones plugged in and have music going, then say I get an IM, or any sort of alert with a sound is raised, the music is routed to the *external* speakers and the alert is routed to the headphones.  

    Basically I'm annoying the hell out of my coworkers if I try to listen to music because i get a lot of alerts (email, a couple of IM clients and a system monitor, all pretty chatty)

    This seems like really screwy behavior.  It almost has to be a stupidly written driver.  That said, one of Windows' major annoyances is that it is excessively noisey by default.  Everything you do makes a noise.  Start up, shut down, log on, log off, ...etc.   So, a long time ago I went into the Windows control panel and turned off almost all of the sounds.  If I'm at my computer, I don't need to hear my computer go BONG every time I get an email.  If I'm not at my computer then the noise is even more pointless.

     



  • @blakeyrat said:

    BTW: USB headsets work awesometastic, about 50,000 times better than sound card port detection shit.

    One case when they actually suck? When you want to live-stream a game.

    USB headsets do report as a "sound card with one input(mic) and one output(the headphones)". They have no mixer. So, you can't record the sound played "into" it, the way you can select Wave Out as recording source of a "full-blown" sound card.
    You of course can direct the sound to "real" card, and record from it - but that means using speakers, or analog headset connected to the jacks.
    Note that if you use speakers, you still can't use your USB headset's mic to put narrative on top - the voice comes from a different input device (totally different "sound card", as far as the software knows) than game sounds.

    That's why, IMO, analog headset in a real sound card is the best.
    And totally agreed on how sucky autodetection is - and THAT's why the first step is to turn it off and assign the jacks manually.



  • @bannedfromcoding said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    BTW: USB headsets work awesometastic, about 50,000 times better than sound card port detection shit.

    One case when they actually suck? When you want to live-stream a game.

    USB headsets do report as a "sound card with one input(mic) and one output(the headphones)". They have no mixer. So, you can't record the sound played "into" it, the way you can select Wave Out as recording source of a "full-blown" sound card.
    You of course can direct the sound to "real" card, and record from it - but that means using speakers, or analog headset connected to the jacks.
    Note that if you use speakers, you still can't use your USB headset's mic to put narrative on top - the voice comes from a different input device (totally different "sound card", as far as the software knows) than game sounds.

    That's why, IMO, analog headset in a real sound card is the best.
    And totally agreed on how sucky autodetection is - and THAT's why the first step is to turn it off and assign the jacks manually.

    I've actually been thinking about doing some game streaming, Spoiler Warning-style. Other than the headset, what's your setup like?



  • Not mine, I'm still suck on XP and use analog headset.

    But one of my friends has USB headset, and Win7. (Also, Realtek main card). The options are:
    * Send game sounds to the Realtek, select Realtek's "stereo output" stream as recording input in the streaming app (Livestream Procaster, or Xfire. They both use same engine, it seems.). That catches game sounds, and if you had an analog mic connected to the card it'd catch it too.
    * Send game sounds to the headset. You cannot "record them back" for streaming, because headset's "sound device" offers only one recording input, the microphone. Result: Silent game with microphone narration.
    * Send game sounds to the speakers, but select the USB as input (only microphone available). Result: As the previous case, tho for different reason.

    Thing is, no app I ever seen other than advanced pro-audio stuff allows you to record from more than one source. So, you need a mixer that joins microphone and game streams, and record from it. Every sound card since at least fifteen years does provide such mixer on-board. But it's internal to the sound card, so if you want to use "second sound card" by which the USB headset appears as, you're screwed.
    One workaround would be installing one of the "virtual sound card" drivers, and make that join the two streams together. I didn't found one that doesn't randomly bluescreen the OS yet, tho. Other would be buying an analog headset and using the sound card's mixer. This is what I do.



  • @bannedfromcoding said:

    Not mine, I'm still suck on XP and use analog headset.

    But one of my friends has USB headset, and Win7. (Also, Realtek main card). The options are:
    * Send game sounds to the Realtek, select Realtek's "stereo output" stream as recording input in the streaming app (Livestream Procaster, or Xfire. They both use same engine, it seems.). That catches game sounds, and if you had an analog mic connected to the card it'd catch it too.
    * Send game sounds to the headset. You cannot "record them back" for streaming, because headset's "sound device" offers only one recording input, the microphone. Result: Silent game with microphone narration.
    * Send game sounds to the speakers, but select the USB as input (only microphone available). Result: As the previous case, tho for different reason.

    Thing is, no app I ever seen other than advanced pro-audio stuff allows you to record from more than one source. So, you need a mixer that joins microphone and game streams, and record from it. Every sound card since at least fifteen years does provide such mixer on-board. But it's internal to the sound card, so if you want to use "second sound card" by which the USB headset appears as, you're screwed.
    One workaround would be installing one of the "virtual sound card" drivers, and make that join the two streams together. I didn't found one that doesn't randomly bluescreen the OS yet, tho. Other would be buying an analog headset and using the sound card's mixer. This is what I do.

    Hum interesting. Two thoughts:

    1. This appears to be a software limitation, not a hardware one-- there's no reason Livestream Procaster or Xfire couldn't simply record from both devices simultaneously, other than they didn't bother to write the feature.

    2. The best solution might be to record the commentary on another computer, and edit it in afterwards. Syncing commentary to the game content might be a bit touch, but you can solve that by just performing an action in the game while simultaneously saying a keyword. Then once the audio is lined-up, edit that out.



  • Wow. I knew Xfire was on the edge of being a spyware-laden piece of crap, a RealPlayer for the modern era, but I didn't realize that Microsoft Security Essentials actually classifies it as a virus now. Christ.

    Livestream Podcaster doesn't seem to be able to record to disk instead of streaming, so... I'll have to find some other solution.



  • Fraps, maybe. Never tried it, dunno what it can do, but it almost surely records to disk.

    Also, sorry for misunderstanding you - yeah, if you want to record offline, you don't have to care about the lack of realtime microphone overlay. We're always livestreaming, so there's no recording to edit later.

    And with Procaster, there's a roundabout way - enable recording to Livestream's servers, then download the FLV back. Sucks for editing, tho.



  • @bannedfromcoding said:

    Fraps, maybe. Never tried it, dunno what it can do, but it almost surely records to disk.

    Also, sorry for misunderstanding you - yeah, if you want to record offline, you don't have to care about the lack of realtime microphone overlay. We're always livestreaming, so there's no recording to edit later.

    And with Procaster, there's a roundabout way - enable recording to Livestream's servers, then download the FLV back. Sucks for editing, tho.

    Nah, I tried it today. Procaster can record to an MP4 file on your drive, and it can mix different sound cards. (Meaning, it can mix my USB headset in with the game audio.) It worked awesomely... you can just completely ignore its streaming features.



  • Shit, I need to update... thanks for the tip!



  • @nexekho said:

    Two defaults.

     

     I may have a shitty ass driver.  I got to this screen, I have one device called Speaker/Headphones.  It is the default and of course I can't change it.  These are analog headphones.  When I plug them in, I still only have this one device called Speaker/Headphones.  The driver is IDT (formerly sigmatel) it's a dell Precision. Is it safe to assume that USB headphones would suffer the same problem?  I don't have any to test.  In the meantime, I'm just listening to music on my android.



  • @CaptainCaveman said:

     I may have a shitty ass driver.  I got to this screen, I have one device called Speaker/Headphones.  It is the default and of course I can't change it.  These are analog headphones.  When I plug them in, I still only have this one device called Speaker/Headphones.  The driver is IDT (formerly sigmatel) it's a dell Precision. Is it safe to assume that USB headphones would suffer the same problem?  I don't have any to test.  In the meantime, I'm just listening to music on my android.

    USB headphones will probably help, as they are detected as a sound *card*, and thus your existing sound card won't be able to screw them up.

    I think your best best is still to delete the driver and let Windows replace it with its copy. Windows' copy almost certainly won't have that problem. And tell your workplace to always do that with Windows 7 machines... the Windows Update driver set is virtually always better than whatever the vendor shipped.



  • @CaptainCaveman said:

    shitty ass driver
     

    bahaha!

    I'm sorry.

    baha



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @bannedfromcoding said:
    Fraps, maybe. Never tried it, dunno what it can do, but it almost surely records to disk.

    Also, sorry for misunderstanding you - yeah, if you want to record offline, you don't have to care about the lack of realtime microphone overlay. We're always livestreaming, so there's no recording to edit later.

    And with Procaster, there's a roundabout way - enable recording to Livestream's servers, then download the FLV back. Sucks for editing, tho.

    Nah, I tried it today. Procaster can record to an MP4 file on your drive, and it can mix different sound cards. (Meaning, it can mix my USB headset in with the game audio.) It worked awesomely... you can just completely ignore its streaming features.

    Ok, I'm getting the show together, and I have some branding and a co-host, and maybe a name.

    Now the problem is, Procaster's great, but my co-host watching it online:
    1) Is interrupted by ads every 15 mins or so
    2) Has 30 seconds of latency

    Problem one can be solved (kinda) with ad-block-- unfortunately, Procaster doesn't have a way of giving them money to silence ads (like Pandora does, for example), or I'd gladly pay for it. (They do have a way to create an ad-free channel-- only $350 per month!)

    Problem two is tougher. I've been dinking around, trying to find a solution to serve video directly from my computer to his, but none of the solutions are worth crap. Does anybody have any advice on this? Basically all it has to do is capture a DirectX window, and the computer's speaker output, and stream it to a remote computer in less than 30 seconds... you'd think this would be trivial and hundreds of apps could do it, but I can't find crap. :(



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Problem two is tougher. I've been dinking around, trying to find a solution to serve video directly from my computer to his, but none of the solutions are worth crap.
    Don't know what stuff you've looked at, but how about one of these: http://www.myp2p.eu/software.php?part=software



  • @intertravel said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    Problem two is tougher. I've been dinking around, trying to find a solution to serve video directly from my computer to his, but none of the solutions are worth crap.
    Don't know what stuff you've looked at, but how about one of these: http://www.myp2p.eu/software.php?part=software

    Hm, I clicked around, but I'm not sure what on that site is supposed to help. I did see a recommendation for XSplit on the forums, so I can try that.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @intertravel said:
    @blakeyrat said:
    Problem two is tougher. I've been dinking around, trying to find a solution to serve video directly from my computer to his, but none of the solutions are worth crap.
    Don't know what stuff you've looked at, but how about one of these: http://www.myp2p.eu/software.php?part=software

    Hm, I clicked around, but I'm not sure what on that site is supposed to help. I did see a recommendation for XSplit on the forums, so I can try that.

    Reading back, I might have got the wrong end of the stick, bit confused now. I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to do, but it sounds like the kind of stuff those guys do regularly as part of streaming sports events. Can't you just run a Sopcast Server? Anyway, might be worth asking on their forums, I'm sure they know more than me about the details.



  • @intertravel said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    @intertravel said:
    @blakeyrat said:
    Problem two is tougher. I've been dinking around, trying to find a solution to serve video directly from my computer to his, but none of the solutions are worth crap.
    Don't know what stuff you've looked at, but how about one of these: http://www.myp2p.eu/software.php?part=software

    Hm, I clicked around, but I'm not sure what on that site is supposed to help. I did see a recommendation for XSplit on the forums, so I can try that.

    Reading back, I might have got the wrong end of the stick, bit confused now. I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to do, but it sounds like the kind of stuff those guys do regularly as part of streaming sports events. Can't you just run a Sopcast Server? Anyway, might be worth asking on their forums, I'm sure they know more than me about the details.

    Ok, so the deal is: I'm playing a video game on my computer and recording the video/audio using Livestream Procaster. I want my buddy to be able to comment on the gameplay as if he were in the same room, so he should be seeing the same video on my screen on his screen. (And we're connected over VOIP for the audio.) Basically I want to get the "playing games on the couch" feeling but using PC games instead of console and where we're several states apart.

    Now, Procaster can actually do this: record to the local HD while at the same time streaming to the web. The problem is that their service is ad-supported (which, like I said, isn't really a problem except when you try to use it the way we are), and they have a high latency (about 30s.)

    So what I'm looking for is a way to stream the video and audio of the game over a network directly to his computer, without passing through a webservice that would add latency like Livestream. It seems like there should be a dozen products to do this, but I can't find any that work.



  • Is the file Procaster records to writelocked? If not, in theory you could put the still-growing file in VLC's (or other meant-for-video) streaming component and make your friend connect to this...



  • @bannedfromcoding said:

    Is the file Procaster records to writelocked? If not, in theory you could put the still-growing file in VLC's (or other meant-for-video) streaming component and make your friend connect to this...

    That's an interesting idea... I'll have to try it.

    VLC actually has "screen" as an input param, so I need to see if it'll do the trick on its own also. (My guess is it'll fail when a DirectX layer is in front. But worth a try.)



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @bannedfromcoding said:
    Is the file Procaster records to writelocked? If not, in theory you could put the still-growing file in VLC's (or other meant-for-video) streaming component and make your friend connect to this...

    That's an interesting idea... I'll have to try it.

    VLC actually has "screen" as an input param, so I need to see if it'll do the trick on its own also. (My guess is it'll fail when a DirectX layer is in front. But worth a try.)

    Ok, I tried VLC's "screen" input, and as suspected it didn't work as soon as DirectX took over the screen.

    The problem with streaming the capture file (if it even works) is that it'll stream my voice also... which will probably cause nasty feedback, but I might give it a try anyway.



  • Could it run in a window? If Aero is off and the window is most of your screen it might be a nice workaround.

    VLC is a godlike video converter, seems to chew through Jpeg Avi to H264 conversions ten times (no exaggeration) quicker than Premier Pro. Actually uses all four cores rather than just one and doesn't eat my entire 4Gb.



  • @nexekho said:

    Could it run in a window? If Aero is off and the window is most of your screen it might be a nice workaround.

    VLC is a godlike video converter, seems to chew through Jpeg Avi to H264 conversions ten times (no exaggeration) quicker than Premier Pro. Actually uses all four cores rather than just one and doesn't eat my entire 4Gb.

    In the tinkering, I got skype to send Overlord 2 when running in windowed mode, so this might be an option. The thing with VLC is... uh... it's an unusable mess. I know how to set up the screen streaming, and I tell it to stream over HTTP, but then... what URL do I give the recipient? That rather critical piece of information seems to have been left-out of the program, and I couldn't figure it out on my own. EDIT: Oh also, I couldn't figure out how to send the audio stream along for the ride.

    I mean, the great thing about VLC is that it does almost everything. the problem is that it's such an unusable mess that you don't know HOW to do anything, and there's no way to figure out it.

    So frustrated with trying to figure this out that I'm actually considering just filming the game footage in a different session then doing the commentary afterwards.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I know how to set up the screen streaming, and I tell it to stream over HTTP, but then... what URL do I give the recipient? That rather critical piece of information seems to have been left-out of the program, and I couldn't figure it out on my own.
    If I remember rightly, you use your IP + the port you chose.

    Previously I suggested Sopcast. I've never used any of the streaming programs to serve content, just to receive it, so I don't know much about the details, but I'm pretty sure that one of them will do what you want. Might be worth posting on the MyP2P forum, because I expect they know more about it than me.

    Just a thought, wouldn't it be easier to send two streams - one video+audio (including game SFX?), one audio only (with your comments) - and have the recipient combine and record them?



  • @intertravel said:

    Just a thought, wouldn't it be easier to send two streams - one video+audio (including game SFX?), one audio only (with your comments) - and have the recipient combine and record them?

    I can't even get the one stream working right, heh.


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