Topic: Need help! (PC Sound on Windows)

[RossRoy]

I was wondering if any of you knew of a program or something that would automatically mute any sounds from non-focused windows on Windows?

It's getting so annoying to be watching a movie (especially suspense/thrillers) and have one of the background applications decide to send an audible warning!

I've disabled sound in most applications already, but there's always one here or there that I seem to forget..

So if you know of something like that, I'd really like to know!

[Touti]

Not sure it's gonna help you Seb but here's what I did.

My motherboard has support for toslink (optical) sound output, I only had to buy the connector and plug it on the motherboard.

I basically have two outputs from my PC to my sound system, one using the standard RCA connectors and one using the toslink.  All my windows applications are using the standard output which is RCA except for my MediaCenter and PowerDVD which are using the toslink output.

With that setup, whenever I watch a DVD from the computer my amp is set to the optical input so any sound coming out of other windows are not heard because they're sent to the Audio1 input of my amp which is not selected at that time.

[RossRoy]

That's what I used to do. My audio card is a M-Audio Revolution 7.1 and it has the standard headphone type jacks, and coax digital out.

So I used to have PowerDVD send out the DD or DTS signal digitally over to my decoder. Which wirks fine actually, but I just discovered a feature of PowerDVD for Doby Compressed Dynamic range, which basically makes it so you can place the volume at a level where you can hear the voices, while at the same time it will not destroy the house's foundation when an explosion occurs (it's also useful when I want to watch a movie, and not wake everybody up each time someone shoots at a bad guy).

My receiver lacks that feature unfortunately.