Vista - Multiple Audio Devices

Hi, I recently purchased a HP Pavilion dv6974 Laptop, it came installed with Vista 64-bit. It works fine and all, just one thing I want to figure out.

The laptop has built-in speakers, a built-in mic, 2 headphone jacks and 1 microphone jack. I plugged my headset into one of the headphone jacks, my headset microphone into the microphone jack, and my external speakers into the second headphone jack.

What I wish to do is to set it up in a way that I can play music through my speakers, and Ventrilo through my headset.

The way I did this before on my desktop was that there was this option in the Realtek Audio Manager called "enable playback multi-stream" that separated the two audio jacks on the computer (one in the back, and one in the front). Then I was able to choose a different audio driver for Ventrilo, and use the default one for music. This was on XP, and I only had one sound card btw.

And now for Vista, I've tried looking through the Audio Device Manager and the Realtek Audio Manager but couldn't find anything that would help much, except in the Realtek Audio Manager there's this "tie up all input jacks something something, etc" that sounded like it was what I was looking for, but all it did was mess up my microphone.

To add more to this confusion, there is actually another audio device in the Audio Device Manager, but it's the Digital Audio Receiver, and I don't really know what that does.

I've asked about this problem elsewhere, and some people suggested that it was impossible due to the internal hardware wiring, but, I tried an older driver that actually gave me 2 audio devices. 1 from the speakers, and one from the headphones. It was exactly what I was looking for, although I would prefer one that ends up with 3 audio devices (2 for each of the jacks, and the built-in speakers).

But using that driver caused the mic to lose its functionality, so I had to revert to the default driver. So I know it can be configured using the current hardware wiring.

Sorry for the long post, but any help is appreciated.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Hi, ForeverRen, and welcome to the forums.

I think HP would be your best bet in this instance....as they would be able to tell you for sure if that can be done with their hardware or not.

Yeah I'm pretty sure it can be done, because the older driver I tried did that, but that driver messed up my microphone so I can't really use it.

No offense, but if the old driver did it by messing up the microphone, then isn' it possible that it really can't do that?