How come I can only play one thing at one time?

[ThaArtist]

Ok so I'm using the Mackie 400f as my interface and I use its equipped ASIO sound system. Say if I have windows media player open and playing something and then happen to browse to oh say... youtube the audio wont play. Or if I'm palying a video with audio on youtube or some other site and I open fruityloops it says my ASIO audio device is already in use...

I understand how and and an extent of why this is happening but how do I make it stop?

I had a dell and I could play 3 or 4 things off the same sound card at the same time if I wanted. It sounded like garbage but hey, I had that option.

Now when I'm in fruityloops and then switch to audition sometimes theirs problems with the ASIO still being tied up in FL. Yes I know you can select an option in both programs to release the driver upon minimize or whatever but I'm so sick of the error messages. I just want sound to work with whatever Im doing.. I'll push stop when I want to or get around to it....


Why is this happening? Is there any way around it? And why did my dells cheap soundblaster allow me to play whatever I wanted? Please enlighten me... this question has plagued me for atleast a year now.

 

[danny.guitar]

I don't know of any way around this, it depends on your sound card and drivers. I think most recording interfaces only support 1 sample rate at a time. I've played something in Windows Media Player, then restored a Reaper project window (which was using 96KHz sample rate) and the song in Media Player also started playing back at 96KHz and the song sped up/changed pitch.

The reason most normal sound cards like the SoundBlaster can play multiple rates at a time is because they are actually locked in at one sample rate (usually 48KHz) and upsample/downsample on the fly. This helps for just using the computer, but sucks for recording.

 

[ThaArtist]

So its like ... basically... better sound cards and drivers only dedicate to playing one "signal" at a time? Or maybe a better way to describe it would be...

They are dedicated to putting all their energy into one source at a time to give it their best!

lol thats it in a nutshell huh?

 

[danny.guitar]

So its like ... basically... better sound cards and drivers only dedicate to playing one "signal" at a time? Or maybe a better way to describe it would be...

They are dedicated to putting all their energy into one source at a time to give it their best!

lol thats it in a nutshell huh?

They can play many different signals but usually one sample rate. This sample rate gets applied to all signals. I guess you can think of it like, it plays everything at the same speed...

I'm not sure if this is true for all recording cards, but I know the 2 that I have are like this.