How to set up an internal sound Card?

[AndrewT]

Hi,
last time I installed my sound card, it took over all sound processing.

I lost the normal computer sound to the little speakers that alert to what one is asking the computer.

I got good music out of the two balanced outputs on the back of the card.

I used XP and E-MU 1212m

I now have win7 on a new PC.

Is there a way to install the sound card such that music and similar go to the sound card and out through the balanced outputs, but the computer housekeeping sounds stay with the on board sound card and come out the SE trs on the back of the MotherBoard?

Keep the answers simple for a computer newbie.

[KatieandDad]

Is it an old sound card ?

Try downloading the latest drivers from the manufacturer.

If its too old you may have to bite the bullet and buy a Win 7 sound card. They are peanuts.

I had same problem when my PC died. I bought a second hand Soundblaster off E-Bay for a tenner. Just check the Creative site to see which cards are compatible with Windows 7.

[AndrewT]

I have not tried to install the internal sound card yet.

I want to avoid the problem I had when I installed it on my older XP PC. So I am asking first.

[KatieandDad]

I would go to the sound card site and look for a Windows 7 driver. A lot of them are picked up generically.

[AndrewT]

emu have a beta version of win7 driver for the 1212m pci.
They also have a driver set for 1212m pci used on an xp64 or vista64 platform.
The sole pcie slot is empty and be used when I fit a pcie video card. I have radeon HD5450.

[wwenze]

Set default playback device to your onboard sound.

Then in foobar or MPC-HC or any player that supports this, select output device to be 1212M.

[qusp]

wow, so many people missed the point of Andrews post!! the emu will work with the new OS and its a nice audio card, better than some generic windows cheapie.


wwenze on the other hand is 100% correct. set up the EMU patchmix control panel as normal and select it from Foobar, but select the onboard sound as your default audio device in the windows sound settings.

you will also need to check the settings in asio or wasapi to turn off exclusive mode. exclusive mode is desirable, but i doubt you will be able to do as you wish with it switched on.

i'm neither a windows user or emu, but i have some experience with both and it was a similar setup on mac os with my RME. i did a quick search to confirm this and it seems correct; perhaps someone will chime in with more specific details.

the EMU drivers were a sore point in win 7 for a long time, hopefully theyve sorted this out for you now. surely they have, because many pro and semipro audio studios use these cards

good luck

[AndrewT]

thanks to Qusp for reading my enquiry.


I'm a bit lost with

check the settings in asio or wasapi to turn off exclusive mode.

can someone chime in and explain for me?

[qusp]

No problem Andrew, sorry i would be just reading manuals to answer this for you in detail for windows as i'm a mac user, hopefully someone with more first hand experience of wasapi in win 7 64bit will help out. i'll do what i can in my own words and include a couple of links that will hopefully help out.

asio bypasses all of the many layers of drivers, mixers etc that are inherent in the modern operating system, it is a way to allow bitperfect audio without other layers, or system tasks from interfering, resampling or otherwise messing with the access the audio hardware has to the audio application->system at the core level and the access the audio application has to the hardware. your EMU will allow the use of asio as standard afaik; its definitely not part of the OS like it is on mac, but i'm pretty sure even on win the emu has ASIO level support in the driver. think of it as the perfect no feedback output stage. as in, feedback will only do harm, the audio is already perfect and feedback will only add undesirable harmonics

wasapi (Windows Audio Session API) also communicates directly with the audio application, but does so from the top of a tree of other objects in the audio path including the mixer, effects processing etc.

wasapi was only brought about since vista and apparently does quite a good job, so the need for something like asio may not be as great anymore since we are now dealing with multiprocessor, multithreaded systems that can much more successfully cope with the audio task without getting 'distracted'. Wasapi is different in that there is an instance of it launched with every audio task you create, but i understand it can still be set to have exclusive access to the audio software

now this is where it gets a bit out of my comfort zone with win. ASIO, WASAPI and waveout (sorry dont know anything about it bar it does a similar job) all handle the audio I/O and all need to be selected and setup to work with the EMU, because they do the best job by making sure that the audio is a 'hands off' process to other system tasks, how this interferes with you also wanting the onboard active i'm not entirely sure since win 7

sorry i cant be of more help

oops nearly forgot the link

heres one on the AVS that has a bit of info on asio and wasapi, i'll come back and post a couple more a bit later, i gotta go get a bit of research done before bed, hopefully its enough to get you started

[AndrewT]

thanks.
I will install the sound card today and have a look for some of the menus suggested.