Using a Pulsar card as a Windows soundcard

[PaulSh]

Back in the earlier days of the Pulsar, I'm sure you couldn't use it directly as a Windows sound card. There were the "Sound Card" software I/O's, but I could never get them to work properly. It's probably something that you wouldn't want to do in a professional environment anyway, but would have been useful for a home studio. Anyway, for years I've had the audio output from my motherboard connected to the Pulsar's analog input. Which works OK, but of course there are sound quality issues. But now, after reading other posts I can see that you can use the Pulsar directly, and indeed Windows lists my 3 Scope Wave-24 software inputs as audio output devices.

So, I have Win7-64 and a Pulsar II running the latest Scope 5.1 beta. I'm currently using WDM/KS with my sequencer, Sonar 8.5.3-64, but will probably move to ASIO when it's more stable. Are there any reasons why I shouldn't use the Pulsar as the default Windows audio output device?

[astroman]

well, that's a big misunderstanding. In those 'earlier days' you could use the Pulsar as one hell of a soundcard, that practically outperformed everything else... there always were multimedia drivers and later WMA... it still does this job on XP perfectly, while my RME 9652 fails...
That 'soundcard' sh*t you refer to was a software driver for other applications that wanted to talk to a Soundblaster Pro (protocol).
Can't tell you about Win 7 or 64bit stuff, tho...

cheers, Tom

[at0m]

Are there any reasons why I shouldn't use the Pulsar as the default Windows audio output device?

Personally, I don't use Scope as default system sound card (many media players, browsers, etc. do not have their own soundcard settings) for the simple inconvenience that you cannot load another Scope project when any of those are using Scope. So Cubase and other studio/production software uses Scope, and the rest uses my onboard card. Both are mixed on a small analog mixer to my monitors.

If you do want Scope as default system soundcard, set it up (in XP, other MS OS's are similar) via Control Panel > Sounds and Audio Devices, and select Scope there. When set, your browser and its flash player and simple media players will now use Scope.

[valis]

Personally, I don't use Scope as default system sound card (many media players, browsers, etc. do not have their own soundcard settings) for the simple inconvenience that you cannot load another Scope project when any of those are using Scope. So Cubase and other studio/production software uses Scope, and the rest uses my onboard card. Both are mixed on a small analog mixer to my monitors.

This is *exactly* what I do, and in fact it's what I do on my non-Scope machine primary machine as well where I use an RME Multiface for audio work. For non-audio work that machine's Realtek HD ALC883 has outputs connected to tape returns on my mixer, and my Scope machine has the same arrangement with the outputs of an ancient SBLive with kxdrivers (using that rather than onboard AC97 because the AC97 is awful and because the dsp is handy at times for fiddling with movies or some inconsequential musical use.)

[PaulSh]

Yes, of course, it's all coming back to me now Back in those days I was running Windows 95 with a Pulsar I and still had kids at home running their old favourite legacy DOS games, so I routed the SB's output through the Pulsar so they could share the same speakers.

And then kept it that way.

[garyb]

i use a luna as the windows soundcard on my internet machine. it's very cool. windows uses the wave drivers.

[dante]

I used to play Quake and Unreal Tournament using a Luna - just setup the WAV drivers & away u go.

[ARCADIOS]

scope cards are not default here as well.

mobo card is the default fr all the trash.... wmp etc.....
scope cards are for daw only