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[jeffporcaro]

I'm a newbie - I hope this isn't old territory.

When I have Media Center open, it monopolizes the bus to the headphone port (where I have my auxiliary speakers plugged in). If I run any other program that uses audio (such as VLC, or iTunes, you name it) - they are forced to route the audio to another output (in my case, a secondary monitor connected via DisplayPort). There is no way to re-route anything else to the headphone port, until I close Media Center, when everything goes back to normal.

Thank you!

[blgentry]

You probably have "Exclusive Access" enabled.  I think it's on by default.  To turn it off:

Tools > Options > Audio > Audio Device > Device Settings > Open Device with exclusive access > (uncheck)

Then quit MC and restart it.  Now all applications on your Mac can talk to the audio device, even when MC is using it.

Brian.

[RoderickGI]

Does that work well on a Mac, without adverse consequences?

I know on a Windows PC turning off Exclusive Access so that Windows sounds or other applications can play sounds means that Windows will mix the sounds for playback, and usually apply any DSP and other settings defined in windows for that playback device.

In Windows that could mean that the Sample Rate, Bit Depth, and format are changed by Windows. Not good. All of a sudden MC could start sounding bad, and it isn't MC's fault. It is Windows! (Using Direct Sound, I believe.)

[blgentry]

I just did some experiments:

Playing from MC alone.
Paused MC, playing from web browser.
Playing from web browser unpaused MC.
Stopped MC, played from web browser, played from MC.

I monitored Audio MIDI setup during these trials.

In all cases the same thing happened:  MC sets the sample rate it needs and the Mac takes it.  The web browser doesn't seem to have any influence on this at all; the sample rate just stays at the last one it was set to.  Because MC always seems to set to 32bit integer, the bit depth isn't an issue either.

Something, probably the OS X mixer, is mixing the audio together when both are playing at the same time.  This seems to work ok, though you probably wouldn't want to listen to two things at once; at least not very commonly.

So I think it's all pretty much ok and disabling exclusive access doesn't seem to have any adverse affects.

Brian.

[RoderickGI]

There you go. Now we know. I think that was worth asking.