Thread: Output different music to all channels of 7.1 sound card

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Does anyone know of a program that will let me output different music files (at different volumes) on all 7 of my 7.1 sound card outputs in my computer?
Last year (2009) I had 4 music tracks from one computer with two sound cards in it. I used four Winamp players to play.
Sound Card A: Winamp to Left
Sound Card A: Winamp to Right
Sound Card B: Winamp to Right
Sound Card B: Winamp to Left
I could only do this with the Front Right and Front Left channels; it would be a lot more useful if I could output different music to all channels: Front Left, Center, Front Right, Rear Left, and Rear Right.
This sounds like something lots of haunters could use; I looked around this forum but could not find anything. Anyone have any ideas or programs?

Thanks

There is a way to do via Windows Media.

[URL="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles/creating71audio.aspx"]

On the microsoft web site, there are a series of articles buried in the Media section, in the professional development section.

I'm just starting to learn how to do the same thing myself.
Give yourself plenty of time.

Here is a link to a little program that allows you to create separate sounds 7.1. Phoenix_AU took Microsoft's program and improved the interface. You would create you different wav files and then use this program to combine them into one 7.1 wav file. Just a note about 7.1 sound, the two side channels carry a signal that has a much lower volume than the other channels. I think there may be one obstacle to what you want to do, it is that the sound files (your music files) have to be of identical length. I'm not positive about this though. If you can get it to work, you could clearly play 5 separate music files through 5 separate speakers using a 5.1 or 7.1 soundcard and a 5.1 or 7.1 computer speaker system.

sound mix setup.zip - Windows Live

Thanks Phoenix for the progy!

Take a look at my blog on creating multi-channel audio with an external sound card. You can do the same thing for 7 channels of an internal sound card.

Also, be sure to set the Speaker setup in the Advanced Audio Properties of your Windows PC to output to 7.1 channels.

Creating multichannel sound using multiple Scary Terry boards and a sound card

We used 7.1 to split voices to different props in 07 and 08. As we were at a big campground haunt (500 campsites all full of kids), we had thousands of viewers. It was a lot of work to create the separate sound files and mux them and all and not a single person seemed to notice that each prop had their own voice! Maybe since I worked so hard on that element I expected too much but over 2 halloweens and nobody noticed? Anyway, last year, we decided that people instinctively tend to associate a particular sound with whatever jaw is moving. We ditched the multichannel sound and it worked just as well. This year, we are adding DMX lighting and I plan to highlight the active prop to more quickly draw the viewer's attention to who is speaking.