Wish List: Sound card hack

[Grimmier]

The problem: my motherboard has onboard audio with 6 ports out the back.

I play a lot of games and tend to use Ventrilo or Teamspeak for communications between team members.

Now i used to have a second crappy sound card to use just for my VOIP comm programs and then have speakers hooked up to the onboard sound for my games and music to play out of. This prevented other people from echoing back through the mic if they were speaking when i was (how rude).

The Idea: There should be a way to hack the drivers for your regular run of the mill realtek AC97 audio controller, so instead of having one controller with 6 ports , it splits it into 2 separate (virtual) controllers each using 3 of the jacks.

This way you could still do the same thing with one for VOIP and the other for your normal sound.

Just an idea i have been boggling over for a few months now. I sadly don't know a thing about tearing apart drivers or where to start.

[Sparda]

It would be possible to write a drive that create a virtual sound card that maps it's outputs as front and rear output. Don't count on the sound been the same, the normal driver will probably tinker with it.

[FireTime]

Realtek onboard sound cards already have the technology available to separate the front and back ports into two separate audio cards. Under advanced settings there is an option to toggle between muting back ports when a front jack is used or separate front and back ports into virtual audio cards.

If you need the ports on the back you could do some modding. 1/8in jacks are fairly easy to solder to from the inside.

[vector]

how about a bluetooth headset? a 2.0 dongle is cheap and so are headsets.