I know in this day and age it is unthinkable to play an actual CD, but it is not practical for me to rip all my CDs to the hard drive. In the past few weeks I have come across several instances where I’ve wanted to play a CD with my htpc, and none of the choices that I have work well with my setup. I use Sage, and I can’t believe that they don’t have an option to play a CD. The problem is my dual soundcard setup. My Envy soundcard uses SPDIF, and it is only used whenever I watch anything in Sage because I can specify which renderer to use. But I have the system default set as the Realtek onboard audio so that it will be used by PowerDVD when I watch bluray. When I use WMP, I’m guessing that it sees that the system is set for 5.1 so when I play a CD, it plays sound through all the speakers. If I use PowerDVD, the settings in it are “6-channel” and “No effect”. So when playing a CD then I only get sound in the left and right with nothing coming out of the sub. So I don’t like this either. The last thing that I’ve tried was Media Player Classic. Supposedly, with MPC I can specify renderer and filter, but no matter what I set it to I still get sound through all the speakers…just like with WMP. I need some kind of player that I can force it to use the Envy as the renderer and the SPDIF. Does anyone know of a player with advanced options like this?
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