I have my PC equipped with two soundcards, the one onboard and SoundBlaster X-fi (Fatality). I use the onboard sound as Default device in XP to send all default sounds to my crappy desktop speakers (useful for Windows sounds/webpages with sound etc). I use my X-fi for digital connection to my hifi amp for music listening.

I might be a little lazy, but I would really like a better management of the settings for my two soundcards.

Sometimes I want to easily turn down the volume being sent to my amp from the non-default card. For this I need to open up "Play control" from systray and change the soundcard before I can do this. Also often I want to disable the digital out from "Advanced settings", if I want to use headphones (I know that the software has detection capabilities, but I have them connected all the time)

Another issue, is a rare occation when I want to play, sometimes I want the sound to be sent to my headphones rather then my speakers (meaning that I need to swap the Default device).

The best solution for me would be an application that sits in the systray providing easy controls, like the volume slider that shows when you single-click the "Play control"-icon.

Am I the only one that find this trivial? The only one that uses multiple soundcards? Would be great if some software exists that provides bettwe management of the issues I mentioned here.

I have a similar setup on XP (a Chaintech AV-710 sending music to an amplifier, and the onboard sound card for everything else). I control the volume of the AV-710 via two hotkeys I have set in an AutoHotkey script that starts with Windows:



(Semicolons introduce comments.)

The 1st parameter of the SoundSet command is the step (-1 and +1)
The 2nd parameter is Component Type, and defaults to Master if omitted or blank
The 3rd parameter is Control Type, and defaults to Volume if omitted or blank
The 4th parameter is Device Number

I have never used the 2nd and 3rd parameters -- maybe you can have a look, to see if they are useful for what you want. Here is the documentation of the SoundSet command:

http://www.autohotkey.com/docs/commands/SoundSet.htm

I don't think you can easily achieve complete control over multiple sound cards. Big pro sound interfaces like EMU 1616 look appealing to me, only they're damn expensive. There you have a single mixer panel and can do whatever you want with a click of the mouse.

But Xi-Fi Fatality is IIRC the top model of SoundBlasters with a breakout box. Why the heck they didn't make the driver's multichannel capabilities comparable to the "pro" product line, I don't know.