Hey Deetz, it’s been a while but I’m still around, and I just wanted to share another quick tip with you. This one is for the budget artists who have a basic setup and need multiple headphone or line level outputs. The quick and easy way is a little adapter called a splitter. for about $10 USD, you can buy a 5 way headphone splitter by Belkin.  It’s called the “Belkin RockStar 5-Way 3.5-mm Headphone Splitter”. Now for around $2 you can also get a 2-way splitter at your local Fry’s or Radio Shack.

Some of you may say, ‘but Proper I’m broke’, or ‘i got 2 bucks in change, but no gas to get to the store’,  well here is a free option if you have RealTek (AC’97) sound card (which is standard on most windows based computers these days).  The solution is is a feature called ‘Retasking’. Retasking is the process in which you assign a jack on your sound card to perform a task other than what it was originally tasked for. For example, I re-tasked my computer’s front microphone jack to be a headphone jack and i now have two front output headphone jacks.

If you are using just your computer sound card (and/or asio4all or an alternative asio host) and you have the little icon pictured below, then you can use this trick.

(RealTek HD Audio Manager software that comes with the drivers)

Double left click this icon in your system tray to open the HD Audio Manager

The first option you want to enable, if it isnt already enabled is retasking. see the below image in the red box labeled ‘A’ for a screen shot.

In the red box labeled ‘B’ we have the audio task that is selected for the related jack to the right. If you plug in a pair of headphones in one of the jacks, it will enable the task menu button. Click it and a window will pop-up asking you “Which device did you plug in?” (pictured below) for multiple headphones you can use either ‘Headphone’ or ‘Speaker/ Line Out’, but whatever you choose you must use this on all outputs you setup (including your existing speaker out jack.)

Once you have plugged in all of your pairs of headphones and have configured your jacks to use the same ‘Speaker / Line Out’ or ‘Headphone’ configuration, you will now have free multiple headphones out just through a little software hacking! awesome eh?

Feel free to play around with these settings and see what type of combinations you can come up with. if you have multiple microphones, this trick will also work with multiple microphones (great for recording room reverb and getting fuller sound.)

Anyways Ladeets and Gentletrackers, I’m off for now. Please feel free to hit me up and ask for help, or better yet tell me what you want to see next on Tracks 101!

Peace,

-Proper

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