Two sound cards on one PC
MatthewHSE
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Joined: 20 Jul 2004
Posts: 122
Location: Central Illinois, typically glued to a computer screen
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I've been having trouble getting both my sound cards working on my Windows 2000 box. Actually, one is the integrated sound card on my Gigabyte motherboard. The other is a Creative Labs PCI card (model number CT4810).

I have all the drivers, but I can't get both cards to work at the same time. Either one will work if the other is disabled, but if I enable both at the same time, neither works at all. The conflict had something to do with no available resource for the card(s) to use.

Some searching around didn't really yield any useful information on how to accomplish this, except to use a USB soundcard instead of the PCI. I'd rather not do that if I don't have to. Some suggested that it isn't possible to get this to work at all, but I'm not ready to buy that just yet and would like to find a few more things to try, if possible.

The object, of course, is to use one card for my external speakers and the other card for my headset/microphone for VoIP use.

Thanks in advance,

Matthew
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vkaryl
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Joined: 31 Oct 2004
Posts: 273
Location: back of beyond - s. UT, closer to Vegas than SLC
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Long years ago, I got this working on my ancient Compaq(!) by doing a LOT of tweaking with and to the IRQ settings through device manager. Keep in mind that this was with Win98SE.... and that it took me weeks to get it right.
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erikZ
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Joined: 30 May 2004
Posts: 148
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matthewhse, my guess is that both are trying to use the same irq channel. I miss the days when you could go in and manually assign irqs easily in windows.

Some mobos will let you do it still, not sure if the newest ones do or not.

Sometimes you can trick the system by just putting the second card in another slot, but I doubt it will work.

On irc recently somebody got two sound input devices working at once on linux, but it wouldn't stick, he gave up and turned off mobo sound. Plus the first one was a soundblaster usb sound card.

Another thing you can try is turning off mobo sound, and try installing a second sound card.

Like vkaryl says, sometimes you can find workarounds for things that the system really isn't designed to handle.

I should test it, lol, I have an old soundblaster pci card, I should stick it in and see if debian recognizes both. My guess is I could train one app to use one, and another app to use the other, but only with using oss and alsa, each in separate apps. All in all, an excercise in futility I'd guess. But worth playing with to see.
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MatthewHSE
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Joined: 20 Jul 2004
Posts: 122
Location: Central Illinois, typically glued to a computer screen
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Hmm . . . so in other words, this is something I don't really want to get into until I have plenty of time to actually deal with it, right?

Too bad - this would have been very handy. You'd think multiple sound cards would be a valuable feature for a lot of people, particularly as VoIP becomes more popular, although I don't imagine that was such a big thing back when my motherboard and OS were created.
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vkaryl
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Joined: 31 Oct 2004
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Location: back of beyond - s. UT, closer to Vegas than SLC
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:: MatthewHSE wrote ::
Hmm . . . so in other words, this is something I don't really want to get into until I have plenty of time to actually deal with it, right?


As to that, messing with it when you don't have plenty of time would only be problematic if you HAD to have sound. IIRC, losing sound didn't screw up any other use of my machine.

Then again, I'm FAR less "sound-oriented" than 99.99% of the rest of the people in the world I guess - I don't even play games with sound on.... continuous music annoys hell out of me, and I absolutely DETEST voice acting.
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MatthewHSE
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Joined: 20 Jul 2004
Posts: 122
Location: Central Illinois, typically glued to a computer screen
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I use VoIP quite frequently, so I can't really be without sound for long. Otherwise it wouldn't be a problem. I'm going to keep looking for possible solutions, but I don't think I'll actually start something unless and until I find something that looks like it will work.
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zerofire
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Joined: 20 Apr 2007
Posts: 2
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Alright people. You have been wondering if IRQ's are tweakable on newer motherboards. I have tested motherboards that where shipped to me this year and all of them have a feature that allows IRQ's to be tweaked with only one catch. The catch is that you have to configure all of your PCI and onboard hardware manualy because the auto assigning system needs to be shut off. It is on by default on all motherboards.
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