Optional playback out for Pandora/browsers

Warrior

Warrior

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Oct 13, 2004
Messages
13,838
My girlfriend just likes Pandora a lot, and i like to play games, a lot. And i have my computer hooked up to 3 playback outputs. TV, Receiver, and PC Speakers. And as you figured i want to be able to play games on my PC Speakers (which i can plug headphones into), and play a browsers music on another "playback device", ie. the Receiver. What we usually do is ill play Mediamonkey on the Receiver, because you can change the output settings, and I'll play games on the PC Speakers, and that works great... but the girlfriend is getting tired of the whole, "pick the music", and just likes to listen to Pandora now....

I've read about other "browser-like" programs that can play pandora, but they don't have audio output in their options.

What would be the best way to go about doing this?
 
I've never heard of anything that can do this. You may be better getting another device like a squeezebox.

The only other thing I can think of is running pandora inside a VM that's mapped to a different output device... and good luck gaming with that running.

It'd be nice if there were a way to set an output device for each process but you can google that mess on your own hah.
 
I'm definitely prepared to do the VM, thats a great idea! But, now how do i make it a different audio output... because I was playing Pandora, and i loaded up Crysis and it went fine...

But if ill have to use a program to chance the output for the processes, i mind as well use the stand alone apps that can play Pandora.....
 
Warrior said:
I'm definitely prepared to do the VM, thats a great idea! But, now how do i make it a different audio output... because I was playing Pandora, and i loaded up Crysis and it went fine...

But if ill have to use a program to chance the output for the processes, i mind as well use the stand alone apps that can play Pandora.....
Click to expand...

I'm not sure... what are you using for output devices?

You may have to do something weird like this:
http://forum.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=33570
if you're using another physical sound output device. My brain hurts trying to figure out how you could get an emulated device to output to a different output section of a host device.
 
Its the outputs on my Motherboard.... Optical for receiver, and headphone Jack for PC Speakers. Other software like mediamonkey can do it fine.
 
this is getting tougher the more i search for solutions. I would donate to an app developer for this....
 
All I can think of, is to set the output as the defaut device, open u[p pandora, then set the default device back to the original output you had.

That way, Pandora should stay on the other device (for that session) while gaming would stay on whatever is the "default" output at the time. This is what I have learned from using my laptop as a HTPC.
 
You can use boxee, it has a pandora app included and you can specify the output device in boxee's settings. I use this setup both at home and at work, and it works wonderfully. Otherwise like jeremyshaw said, you can "Set default device" to sound system, open browser and play music. And then "Set default device" back to your pc speakers and open your game.

Comprehensive audio output settings:


Really good Pandora app (Better than pandora.com IMO)
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top