All this while, since my last XP reinstall, my computer has been passwordless as I wanted to simulate a proper HTPC environment, one which allows me to not go near my PC at all if I want to watch anything. Well, by setting a numeric password, I can still use the remote to key it in. And that’s that.
Anyway, earlier I mentioned the problems I had with hooking up my PS2 to my PC’s sound system. First was the RCA/miniplug problem, which was solved with a simple adapter bought at Carrefour for RM5 (I hear they’re much cheaper at Pasar Rd, but I doubt I’d be making my way there soon). Thought that would be the end of my woes.
Then this other problem appeared. In my computer, I have two sound “systems” (I’d say cards but one is actually built-in). The reason why I revived my old SB Live was because:-
- I have a 5.1 speaker system with 3 miniplug inputs (front, rear, center)
- I have an onboard sound system with 3 miniplug outputs, with one functioning as either center or mic.
- I have a headset mic for XFire and Teamspeak.
So that situation left me with no input jacks for my mic, and that’s where Live came in. Thinking back, maybe I should’ve bought a speaker set with digital inputs. Oh well.
Now all was fine and dandy, since I never had to hear what I actually spoke into my mic. And when I did, the program, like BF2’s mic test, will handle the pass-thru. But for the PS2, which is an external source, doesn’t have anything on the PC to do this for it.
Normally, one can simply enable the playback of the recording input in the standard Volume Control panel. But that only works on single-sound-card configurations. At least for me, I can only enable playback of the inputs of the playback device, which in this case is my onboard system. But those aren’t in use and cannot be used in the first place.
So I went around looking for a free and easy solution that would just help me pass thru recording from one sound device to another. The web mostly led me to some podcasting software, which don’t suit my needs, and back to the ever popular Winamp.
Winamp already has a feature that lets you stream music from Line-In. But it doesn’t seem to be smart enough to figure out which Line-In to listen from. My guess is it was probably trying to pick up sound from my onboard’s Line-In, which doesn’t exist in the first place.
So here comes a nifty Line-In plugin. Not only does it read Line-In, it’ll read from any input that you’ve set as your recording one, and from any device too! Like the built-in Line-In feature of Winamp, all you have to do is open the URL line:// and the rest is magic.
One final thing to do after that though, is reduce the delay from the input to the output. Before winamp does any output, the sound data goes through a few steps, mainly visualisation and buffering. Visualisation is no problem since I have that turned off, but DirectSound buffering was still causing about 0.8sec lag. Imagine the annoyance while playing a game.
I have a fairly fast computer so I don’t think it’ll be skipping much, so I just reduced the buffer from the default 2000ms to something close to zero. That pretty much did the trick, and the result was 5 hours of Final Fantasy XII.
You can also switch your Winamp output to WaveOut, which also does the job of removing noticeable delay. But only DirectSound will output to all my speakers instead of the the front ones. Or you can try the other fast alternatives documented here, which don’t seem to make any difference to my ears. They’re all good, anyhow.