Different Audio on front and rear channels

Question

Motherboard : Gigabyte G31MS2L

Drivers Realtek: 6.0.1.6235

I want to have Skype on the blue jack and Windows Media Player on green. Is that possible?

Here's my current setup:

Answer 1

Doing this requires both hardware and software support. I'm pretty sure the distinction between your speaker and headphone ports is how much power is pushed out on them. In other words, I seriously seriously doubt you can drive them a separate audio devices.

To accomplish this, you're going to need another sound card, at least. Provided you actually get one going, you'll still need OS-level support. I have no idea if Win7 can let you select what audio device is used for output for individual apps. I'm going to assume not.

If I were really really keen to get this effect, I'd probably try to write my own video player (hopefully you can write an interface that extends Windows Media Player - or, just extend VLC or mplayer). Through that, I'd seek to output that audio to a secondary sound card. Still not convinced of how easy that'll be.

I suggest you consider just using a second machine, if you really need this functionality. Use Synergy to share a single Keyboard and Mouse between them, if that helps you.

Edit: Based on other answers provided, it sounds like some sound cards do in fact provide the required hardware functionality to accomplish this. Make sure you've got any hardware specific utilities installed and poke around them to see if you can some how change a setting to run your front and back ports as separate audio devices. Still, some level of OS/application support would be required to use that - though judging by some comments here, Windows 7 probably has some means of managing that.

Answer 2

What you need is some sort of advanced audio driver that can create two virtual stereo sound cards whose channels are mapped to channels on the physical sound card. Unfortunately I don't know of any that can do that.

Once you get that going, just go into the preferences of the applications in question and have them each use the appropriate virtual audio device.

Answer 3

I have a Gigabyte motherboard with Realtek audio stuff as well. In my case I have a program called Realtek HD Audio Manager, maybe you have something similar? Came with the audio drivers.

Anyways, in that program, in the upper right corner there's a link which says Device advanced settings. Click on that and I get a dialog where I can choose "Make front and rear output devices playback two different audio streams simultaneously".

Edit: Didn't notice your blue and green requirement thing. What I was talking about was to make the front and back jacks work as separate devices... that way you can connect your speakers to the back, and your skype headset to the front for example :)

Answer 4

I don't think this is possible. I'm surprised that you get sound out of the blue, cause blue is usually a line IN. If both of them are line outs, again, it is unlikely they are seen as two outputs, but rather one audio output split into two ports.