Two sound cards - record with one and playback with the other?

CoLD_SToRAGE wrote on 1/15/2023, 5:53 AM

HI!
I have two soundcards, and I need to record with one soundcard, and playback with the other.
In SoundForge Pro 15 preferences, it seems there's no way of doing this?
Seemingly, one can only select one card or driver, and record and playback with the same card.
Is this an oversight on my part, or a missing feature in SoundForge Pro 15?
I would politely request that people don't reply with "...why would you want to do this?", as this kind of questioning is irrelevant, as my set-up is precisely how I would like it, and I've done this in the past with other software on PC and Mac without any issue.
Many thanks for any guideance.
Kind regards,
Tim.

Comments

emmrecs wrote on 1/15/2023, 8:47 AM

@CoLD_SToRAGE

Welcome to the Magix user to user forums.

Assuming you are using an ASIO audio driver one of its limitations is that only ONE sound device can be used for both playback and recording. This is NOT a limitation of Sound Forge or any other DAW but one imposed by the ASIO specification.

There is a theoretical workaround to this, which is to use ASIO4All, but success cannot be guaranteed! However, it does allow the user to select different devices for recording and playback. However, it is not necessarily "easy" to set up!

HTH

Jeff
Forum Moderator

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CoLD_SToRAGE wrote on 1/15/2023, 12:58 PM

Hey Jeff
Thanks for the info. 😉
I'm not using ASIO on my PC at all just now...

The way it's set-up, is that I have two pro level audio devices that I can choose from, and both have audio in and out capability.

SoundForge doesn't have an option to set the incoming audio from one device and the outgoing to another device. The choice of hardware is at the audio level, not the record/playback level. So, if you choose one device while looking at playback, and then select record and change the device, then it's changed for playback too...


However, Skype for instance can do this... where you can choose the microphone or audio input from one device, and playback either on the same one, or any other.


Actually, it's a shame I'm not using a Mac, because there's this option: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202000 - Create an Aggregate Device to combine multiple audio devices.

I did read something about WDM/KS (Windows Driver Model/Kernel Streaming) drivers, where you can do something similar on Windows, so I'll do more digging.

 I will look into ASIO4ALL too, but maybe multi-device could be implemented in SoundForge in the future?

ATB,
Tim.

SP. wrote on 1/15/2023, 1:16 PM

@CoLD_SToRAGE ASIO4ALL should solve your problem because it usually shows all inputs and outputs of every sound device in your computer. But it's a generic driver and you might have a lot higher latency times.

Alternatively, it looks like there are sound cards which can expand their inputs with other sound cards via optical cables. So, if your output sound card can do that, you can integrate the inputs of your other sound card.

Skype doesn't need samples accurate recording and playback like DAWs. Therefore it's fine to select two different devices. In DAWs on Windows there probably would be unacceptable time drifts between the different sound devices if this would be possible. I believe it's missing drift compensation compared to MacOS.

CoLD_SToRAGE wrote on 1/15/2023, 5:10 PM

I’ll definitely give ASIO4ALL a shot.

Timing and latency aren’t really an issue in my case, as I’m simply needing to record from one device and then play-back as I edit via a second.

They don’t interact nor play at the same time.

Thanks for the extra info. 😉