Multiple Sound Cards

[Steve Williamson]

Now I am getting into sorting out the audio distribution, I have opted for HAI's new HiFi setup, all I want to do is have a small PC running with 4 sound cards (or 1 card with 4 outputs) to feed the 4 inputs on the Home Audio, does anyone know of any software (nix or M$) that will play 4 different playlists to different audio hardware on the same machine? Prefer just audio player with out the bells and whistles.

[aeon]

Winamp would be the easiest one to setup that I know of (not really familiar with the *nix side of things though). Can easily run multiple instances and select which soudcard to use.

Foobar may also work but from memory it's support for multiple instances is a little buggy.

[Steve Williamson]

Thanks, didn't realise that winamp allowed mulitple instances until I went searching through the options.

Should work perfectly, each person can have their own playlist and access it from any location in the house. Can you organise the playlists from another PC on the network?

[khellandros66]

IIRC Creative Labs support multiple card at a time but I may be wrong.

~Bob

[aeon]

There's a couple of plugins for winamp that I know of that allow you to control winamp via a web browser. They allow you to choose the port so you could set up each instance of winamp to run on a different one.

BrowseAmp - http://www.browseamp.com/
WAWI - http://www.flippet.org/wawi/about.shtml

[Arcadian]

Steve Williamson wrote:

Now I am getting into sorting out the audio distribution, I have opted for HAI's new HiFi setup, all I want to do is have a small PC running with 4 sound cards (or 1 card with 4 outputs) to feed the 4 inputs on the Home Audio, does anyone know of any software (nix or M$) that will play 4 different playlists to different audio hardware on the same machine? Prefer just audio player with out the bells and whistles.

Steve, have you got this working yet? I'm intrigued by the 4 soundcard setup. Would you be so kind as to give some advice on what cards you have used, what issues you have had with the set-up to have separate instances play on each of the four soundcards/outputs. THis seems like a no-brainer solution for a DIY home multi-zone audio center.

Thanks in advance.

Arc

[Steve Williamson]

Arc, I am trying to get hold of an old M410 audio card here in Australia so that I can use the cards 4 seperate outputs instead of trying to get hold of a MBoard with 4 PCI slots in it.

Does anyone have one of these cards?

I have a VIA MS10000 board that is fanless and designed for custom enclosures, I will fit it and the card in a pro audio 1RU case and sit it in the rack with a couple of hard drives for music. Should look pretty professional and not cost the earth.

[basementjack]

There's also some software called remoteamp - that runs on any Windows Mobile Device - so you could have some cool color remotes!

[Scott@RT]

khellandros66 wrote:

IIRC Creative Labs support multiple card at a time but I may be wrong.

~Bob

Not wise with Creative sound cards -- at least not to have multiple Creative Labs cards in the same PC, as they are likely to get confused with the drivers, since the Creative drivers themselves are not written to support multiple instances of sound cards -- unless there is something with *nix drivers that have been written by a third party to do so. But otherwise the Creative drivers are not very good with trying to run multi-client applications, and they are not set up well AT ALL to run multiple Creative cards side by side. (I speak from long, bitter experience with Creative sound cards in music PCs. )

For an application like this, where you want to have more than one sound card running at the same time, running multiple different applications, you are probably best to use sound cards of different brands. (You may also want to run different media players for each room, rather than trying to keep multiple instances of the same media player sorted. Though I suppose there may be ways of doing this better in Linux than in Windows?)

You'd probably have better luck using an M-Audio card with multiple outs (like their 1010) or an RME sound card (e.g., RME Multiface), if you wanted to do this with just one audio interface, or one brand of audio interface. Both of those companies should have good support in *nix as well. I haven't tried it with M-Audio myself, but I have tried it with RME cards (which are fantastic, rock solid, stable sound cards, btw, as well as very good customer support and excellent legacy driver support), though my experience with this is within Windows.

As a suggestion, you could get one of their older Hammerfall cards with multiple ADAT I/O fairly cheaply off ebay, then get a Behringer ADA8000 or similarly inexpensive 8 channel ADAT ADC/DAC, and run those outputs to the other rooms in the house, and then use the analogue outs (quite good converters) and the SPDIF and/or ADAT out (with some DACs) again for the main room.

Echo is another company that I know have good multi-client driver support, where you could assign different outputs to a given application and run multiple applications simultaneously. The Echo Layla is an 8-in/8-out audio interface (sounds great too). Though I don't know what their Linux driver support is like.

Actually, a really good resource for audio stuff within Linux is here:

http://www.alsa-project.org/

I just checked their sound card database, and it looks like the Echo sound cards are well supported.

http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc...oration#matrix

You can probably find some of their older cards for a pretty reasonable price these days second hand if you look. The Echo, RME and M-Audio cards were made as pro/semi-pro audio recording interfaces, and any of these will SMOKE even the best of the consumer/gamers' Creative sound cards for sound quality. They will cost you more than a cheap Soundbast*rd, but the audio quality, flexibility and stability will be far superior.

[Scott@RT]

Steve Williamson wrote:

Arc, I am trying to get hold of an old M410 audio card here in Australia so that I can use the cards 4 seperate outputs instead of trying to get hold of a MBoard with 4 PCI slots in it.

Steve, I just had a look at an old review of the M-Audio Delta 410 (http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Feb0.../delta410.asp), because I suspected that this one would tell me whether the M-Audio Delta series drivers have multi-client capability, and at least from this article it looks like they've had multi-client capability since Win98, so it certainly should be there within later versions of windows, and I would expect it *should* work in Linux too.

Check here:

http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc...-MAudio#matrix

[Steve Williamson]

Still can't find a 410 anywhere

Thought about using the cheap USB soundcard things and using four of them.

[Scott@RT]

Steve,

While it's a little more expensive than the 410, you might be more easily able to find a second hand Delta 1010LT, which is basically the same card except it has more inputs. The PCI Delta 410 seems to have been discontinued in favour of the newer firewire version of the 410 (which is typically selling at ~US$299), but I do still see some of the 1010LTs around for around US$199, and sometimes cheaper on ebay.

Another option, if you have 2 free PCI slots, is to grab a pair of the Delta 44 or Delta 66 and run them side by side. You should be able to run multiple instances of ANY of the M-Audio Delta series side by side in your computer. The M-Audio driver will basically treat them as one big, multi-I/O interface. The same go with any of the Echo products, as well as RME, Ego-Sys, etc., and I believe all of these will support multi-client operation as well.

You might also look into the M-Audio Revolution 7.1 cards (http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_u...71-focus.html). Actually, looking at the specs, that might actually be a quite good choice for HTPCs, because it also has all the gaming features (like EAX), etc. But the difference between this and the **** Fraudigy cards is that it won't be resampling all audio that's not recorded at 48 kHz sample rates like the Fraudigy cards do (which is bloody RIDICULOUS!).

You may occasionally find the Delta cards and other similar interfaces on the ebay.com.au site if you keep watch for them, but you'll probably have better luck if you look to the U.S. site. It's not like these would be a huge, weighty package, so I would think it needn't cost the earth to ship, and, for the most part, I'm pretty sure that computer parts are exempt from import duty.

Actually . . . since I brought up the subject, I just checked an online database I use when we export RealTraps to other countries. I might as well give you factual info where I can instead of speculation!

Indeed computer parts, including sound cards and other multimedia cards are exempt from import duty in Australia.

Another good place to look, if you don't mind purchasing from the UK, would be the Readers' Ads section over on the Sound on Sound website: http://www.soundonsound.com/readersa...wse.php?Cat=21

You might also look into the M-Audio Revolution 7.1 cards (http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_u...71-focus.html). Actually, looking at the specs, that might actually be a quite good choice for HTPCs, because it also has all the gaming features (like EAX), etc. (this is assuming you are using a Windows box -- if you're going to be using Linux I assume you'll need to check the ALSA site to find out what is supported). But the difference between this card and the **** Fraudigy cards is that it won't be resampling all audio that's not recorded at 48 kHz sample rates like the Fraudigy cards do (which is bloody RIDICULOUS!).

Another one to look at is Terratec (they actually make a card that is similar in I/O configuration to the Delta 410: http://audioen.terratec.net/modules....=article&sid=7

All that said, if you are going with a Windows box, and you want something that is in the high end audiophile range, the Emu 1820M or 1616M is probably the best sounding interface on the market right now under the US$1000 mark. It has the same converters as those in the top end Pro Tools systems, and the analogue circuitry is VERY well implemented. This will give you a sound quality that approaches the high end stand-alone DACs (probably not quite as good as the Benchmark, for example but **** close enough, especially in a box that costs under US$500. The only issue with these is that they really are more set up for recording/project studio use, so the routing in the sound card's mixer can be a bit confusing to set up for the first time user who may not be used to dealing with this kind of thing. BUT . . . it does come with a lot of routing presets to give you a good starting point.

Sorry for the long post (it's a habit of mine ), but I hope there's at least something in there that might be helpful to you!

So are you using Windows or Linux, Steve?

[Steve Williamson]

Thanks Scott, going Windows box as usual, your idea about two Delta 44's looks interesting, however, I am going to use the Epia MS10000 as it is fanless and comes as a bare board so I can build it into a custom case to look like an normal peice of AV equipment, it only has one pci slot but I could use a dual riser for it.

I will try to find the 101 or 410 on a US site and pay the postage, don't need the audiophile output as it is only going to HAI HiFi 40W whole home audio.

Regards