I am running MC 21 on Win 7 64 bit. MC 21 says it's output is to a "digital jack." I have no digital jack out on this machine.
Almost all audio devices have a digital jack, even if you aren't aware of it. I think you will find that your machine has it as well. Does your motherboard/sound card have an Optical or Coaxial S/PDIF connector(s)? If so, those are your "digital jacks". The attached image of my Windows Playback Devices dialogue window shows my on motherboard Realtek sound outputs, plus the AMD video card HDMI output, and the JRiver WDM Driver. You can see two "Realtek Digital Output" devices, one of which is Optical. Those are my "Digital Jacks".
Doesn't MC21 have and use its own driver for output to the rear audio jack? Or does it only use the native audio driver?
No. It uses the hardware driver, as it must. JRiver don't write drivers for all the possible hardware that could exist on a PC. The PC component manufacturers do that. However MC does control whether audio is played using WASAPI, ASIO, etc., and JRiver have a ASIO driver. I'm not actually sure what/who provides the WASAPI layer, other than it is a Windows standard audio layer. I'm assuming Microsoft provide it, and the Realtek driver must support it.
Anyway, the hardware driver controls which output audio is sent to. Of course that can be set in MC, but the driver controls the flow of bits.
Yes, as long as I do not select MC 21 for the audio device. I'd love it if someone would answer my question.
Where are you selecting MC21 as the audio device? In the Windows Playback Devices dialogue, as per the image? If so, you have selected to output all audio originating outside MC to the MC WDM Driver, which is an input to MC. For example if you play videos in YouTube using an Internet Browser, and output to the "JRiver Media Center 21" Playback Device, you are actually outputting to the MC WDM Driver, which is an input to MC. You then will hear the sound through MC, so you must have MC running, and you must have MC set up correctly. Read
this.
You still have to select the correct physical device to output audio to in the MC "Options>Audio>Audio Device" setting. If you just have some speakers connected to your PC, then select Speakers as the output inside MC, and audio will work. If you have something more complex than a set of speakers, tell us about it.
So, exactly which version of MC are you running. The latest is MC21.0.66. Is that what you have?
What audio hardware do you have? Just motherboard audio, or a sound card, or a USB DAC, or what?
Do you use a Pre-Amp, Amp, Receiver, or just speakers?
Over to you.