Media Center 20.0.41 now includes a sound driver. This lets any program or source output data to Media Center. Think Spotify, Pandora, Tidal, BBC, YouTube, Netflix, etc.
Thanks to Hendrik for his help smoothing out the driver install.
Enjoy!
INSTRUCTIONSWhen you install MC 20.0.41 or higher, a WDM driver is also installed.
Please Note: In build 96 and above, the feature is off by default. Please turn it on in Tools > Options > General > Features. You may need to install again.
In Windows Control Panel > Sound, you can set Media Center as the default device.
This means Media Center will capture any output from any program. It will capture the output to the active zone. You're free to use any and all the DSP richness of Media Center on the stream.
Edits by JimH -------
If you use MC's WDM driver, you should probably set MC to run Media Server on Windows start. It's in MC's options for Startup.
Please post WDM problems here:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=93720.0Thanks to Arindelle for posting more details on the French board here:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=92603.msg637663#msg637663It's recommended to set this up for a new zone, which you can do by right clicking on Playing Now and choosing Add Zone.
You may need to adjust the buffer size down in Options > Audio > Device settings. I used 10ms.
I'm now playing Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald on Spotify to MC. Nice!
Why do this? It gets you everything MC can do with the sound. DSP, zones, volume leveling, convolution, etc. It seems simple, but one of my big wishes has been to control Netflix volume with my MC remote. I had to find the receiver's remote to do this. Now I can do it with the MC remote.
I'd like to echo Matt's thanks to Hendrik for contributing key parts of this, and congratulations to Matt.