Split 5.1 stream to 3 stereo tracks realtime

[Wildt]

I own a "multi-track" external soundcard with 6 analouge output channels, grouped as 3 "stereo tracks".

These are exploited to the windows OS as 3 stereo sound devices. I need to be able to somehow route the 5.1 channel soundstream from whatever mediaplayer to these 3 "audio devices" but I have failed to figure out how.

In essence I need some kind of virtual 5.1 channel audio device that I can chose as output device in a media player, which then splits the stream into 3 stereo streams which can be assigned to whatever "physcial" output devices.

Can anyone help?

[Skelsgard]

In order to achieve what you want you would need a player capable of rendering as many streams as desired with different renderers each at the same time.
There´s no such player to my knowledge.
It can be accomplished with Graphedit though. But it will mean to create the Graph every time you want a movie to be played. I remember MV2Player can load graphs but I don´t know how it will cope with this kind of graph.

Cheers.

[Wildt]

Well, I just found it hard to believe that a soundcard advertised as capable of "5.1 monitoring" and having 6 fully balanced jack outputs labeled "R, L, RL, RR, C, LFE" wouldn't be able to support 5.1 streams from media players out of the box, so I asked the support site - here's the reply:

The Saffire LE will work in surround if your software has discrete outputs for surround, e.g. when using a audio or video DAW.
However your DVD software will not be able to offer discrete outputs.

AC3 mode offers 5.1 output via the RCA digital output. This can be connected to a 5.1 decoder amp.

So I surfed for something similar to what I wrote in the first post, and came across VAC. If it was able to solve my problem, I couldn't figure out how, so I asked the author and got this reply:

No, VAC cannot alter a stream such way. But you could find an
application that can (or create such application yourself) and use VAC
to route a stream to this application and from it.

I'm still looking... :(

I could imagine that people familiar with device driver development and audio streams could code it based on MSVAD (Microsoft Virtual Audio Device) - but that isn't me.

[ursamtl]

I think this is more related to drivers than anything else. Try installing the free ASIO4ALL driver. This sits on top of your Windows driver and provides ASIO inputs and outputs up to the maximum supported by your card. Depending on the software you're using for playback, this may give you three sets of output pairs.

You might also try Foobar2000 (also free at www.foobar2000.org) configured with its "Kernal Streaming" output setting. This works beautifully on my PC and in fact gives me the cleanest sound with noticeably more extended and smoother high frequencies than even the 24/96 outputs. When I load 6-channel files in Foobar, it plays them back through six channels flawlessly.

Keep trying, it'll work!

[Wildt]

I think this is more related to drivers than anything else. Try installing the free ASIO4ALL driver. This sits on top of your Windows driver and provides ASIO inputs and outputs up to the maximum supported by your card. Depending on the software you're using for playback, this may give you three sets of output pairs.

You might also try Foobar2000 (also free at www.foobar2000.org) configured with its "Kernal Streaming" output setting. This works beautifully on my PC and in fact gives me the cleanest sound with noticeably more extended and smoother high frequencies than even the 24/96 outputs. When I load 6-channel files in Foobar, it plays them back through six channels flawlessly.

Keep trying, it'll work!

Thanks for the tip, but I really need the virtual audio device approach, so that it's a generic solution for all dvd/media players. I've been looking and looking, and have now reached the conclusion that there isn't a such solution available :(

I've come across other people with the same problem, and even people with two physical stereo sound cards wanting to use them for surround, so there is a demand for it. Maybe this will be my reason to pick up windows programming :eek: