Dual Sound Cards - Page 2

Vchat20 · 04-28-2005, 08:56 PM

i dont know about you, but the dual sound card setup works just fine here and i had no trouble whatsoever installing it. onboard sound is a soundmax card and the pci card is a soundblaster 16 card. i use the soundmax card for the main sound and the soundblaster mainly for the gameport. but ive had audio run through both cards at the same time and again, no problems.

and from the looks of your setup, it seems like it should deal with it well. so the only thing i can say is that it might just be a bad set of drivers for the card. which methods have you tried to install it? xp hardware install wizard? sound card install program? have you thought about trying to find related drivers on driverguide as an additional solution?

djXternal · 04-28-2005, 08:56 PM

yes i checked the normal soundblaster site and couldnt find it (too old of model) but i found it on the used/refubed creative labs page....

opps:
how would i go about changing the IRQ and address... and what exactly am i suppossed to change it to?

djXternal · 04-28-2005, 08:58 PM

vchat20:
driverguide? is that a website... and ive tried both methods of installing the drivers

Vchat20 · 04-28-2005, 09:02 PM

looks like you got a whole mess of drivers to check out here

opps · 04-28-2005, 09:09 PM

something like this.

djXternal · 04-28-2005, 09:16 PM

wow how many offers do u have to sign up for to get an acct at driversguide?

Vchat20 · 04-28-2005, 09:38 PM

dont bother. sign in with the following info:

username: drivers
pass: all

Cris · 04-29-2005, 07:39 AM

I tried having dual sound cards with a PCI one and the onboard and didn't work, that's why I especially said "as far as I knew"...

murdermuppet · 04-29-2005, 09:04 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by djXternal

when i try to install using the provided installer from the factory, it wont even let me attempt it because for some reason XP didn't detect the card

If you mean that neither the Detected New Hardware notification bubble or the Add New Hardware wizard popped up automatically, there's good chance that the card is dead. In this case, try it in another machine.

I'm guessing that the driver install freezes at a certain point because Windows is attempting to initialize the card. Assuming the card is good, this can be caused by an IRQ conflict. First you must check the IRQ by pressing the Pause button when the machine is booting and flashes your system resource table on the screen. This is the next screen after post, right before Windows begins to load. (You'll have to disable any boot logo either in bios or by pressing the appropriate key, which is often TAB.) Once you get a clear view of that table, you can see what is sharing IRQs with what. Some devices have no problem sharing IRQs, some do. If your sound card is (which will show as PCI MULTIMEDIA DEVICE) in conflict with another device, you can try to change its IRQ in BIOS setup. (You cannot change the IRQ from within Windows.) The best thing to do first though, is to simply free up some IRQs and see if the board reassigns them properly. You can disable LPT ports and COMM ports to gain a few free IRQs. Sometimes you can disable 'Assign IRQ to Video' or 'Assign IRQ to USB' to gain more, but those settings can break other things. Check the resource table again to see if your card has a new IRQ. Even if it doesn't, check to see if it works now. It often will. Usually (I want to say 'aftermarket') boards allow you to assign IRQs by PCI slot. You can try this, as well as physically moving the card to a different PCI slot. (Some slots always share an IRQ with another.)

So this is what you need to do:
1. Try the card in another machine if possible.
2. Disable any unused ports in BIOS.
3. Move the card to a different PCI slot.
4. Try changing the IRQ in BIOS.

djXternal · 04-29-2005, 11:03 AM

Ok i fianlly got this card working after about 8hrs of trying... the problem seemed to be with the drivers, i went through the list of em that vchat20 said to try on drivers guide and got an older version of the drivers to install and it eems to work fine now

djXternal · 04-29-2005, 11:08 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by Vchat20

yes you can have 2 sound cards. i do here myself since the onboard card doesnt have a gameport. but to make use of both, the programs you wish to use have to have the ability to tell it what sound card you want it to use. i know winamp and windows media player can do this.

How can you configure windows media player to use a secondary sound card?