The Tenuous Link

Something that has got harder in Windows Vista ...

The sound from my computer comes through a receiver (an amplifier with a built-in radio tuner). I've connected the computer to the tape loop of the receiver, and I leave the amplifier set to the radio input with "tape monitor" switched on. That means that the radio is coming in to the computer "line in" input from the amplifier tape output, and the amplifier plays back whatever sound the computer sends back out to the tape input connection.

Usually I don't want to hear the radio, so I mute the "line in" input in the Windows sound mixer, and unmute it when I want to hear the radio. Whether the radio is muted or not, the normal sounds from Windows (mp3s, or other Windows noises) come out through the speakers. That was easy to do in versions of Windows before Vista, but I keep forgetting how to do it in Windows Vista.

Here's the new process:

1. Right click the volume control icon (in the system tray of the taskbar), and choose "Playback devices"
2. Choose the appropriate soundcard and speakers option from the list of playback options. (I only have one entry in the list, but I still have to click on it.)
3. Click the "Properties" button, and choose the levels tab.
4. Mute or Unmute the Line In input by clicking the speaker icon.
5. Click OK to close all the Speaker configuration and Sound configuration windows.

That's about twice as many clicks as in Windows XP.

Update: Setting the record source is also confusingly different from my XP-style expectations. One input to the soundcard must be nominated as the default, and that is the only one that will be recordable, except that the sound mixer (with the playback configuration as described above) is available as an option if you want to record computer generated sounds, or mixed inputs. See http://fxaudioeditor.com/vista_recording_problems.htm

Labels: vista