[Mouth]

Hi gang:
I'm on Skype and I'm listening to an auction online...

Is there a way to seprate de sound? Like... If I go to Skype... the webpage's sound automatically shuts off and when I'm back at the webpage... Skype shuts up?

Please let me know.

Sincerely,
Mouth

P.S. Another example is (without pressing 'Pause') I'm viewing a trailer and listening to iTunes.

[Mouth]

More like discriminating the sound depending on the window I'm at.

Please help me out.


Sincerely,
M

[Dave]

AFAIK, no. That kind of "one app shuts up while another app is doing something" interoperability has to be coded into the app.

[turbulentfurball]

My first PC's sound card was incapable of playing sound from two different programs at once (I'm talking circa 1996 here), so I'd get an error message if, for example, I tried to use CD Player and WinAmp at once. I'd gladly donate it if I still had it!

[curiousuburb]

Flash/Shockwave can remain active audio despite the window not being foreground focus. There are times I'm browsing a shockwave site with mouseover sound, and despite being in another foreground Safari window or other app (sometimes with its own audio), I can still trigger the non-focus window's event sounds.

[demo] <speaker adjust warning> shockwave link autoplays music in intro, then serves as demo Check the awesome-for-1996 "Great Day in Harlem" and wait for the 1958 Art Kane photo to fully load. The intro shockwave plays jazz, but once the photo loads, you can mouseover certain famous folks in the photo and get audio clips (and click for info, etc.). With the mouseover jazz working, switch apps. Safari windows, too, but other foreground apps still don't interfere with the shockwave mouseover if you roll the same screen area. Now try it with another media playing in the foreground window. Is that what you wanted? Minimizing the window ends the active mouseover detection of course, but the dock behaviour of media players is special code anyway. [/demo]

[tangent]
Great way to weird out a coworker... hide a mouseover event sound window that looks like their desktop under active windows.
[/tangent]

I recall seeing prefs options in QT and some other media players to mute the audio if it isn't the foreground focus/process. Acquisition offers a tickbox for the internal audio player to pause iTunes or not, clearly capable of stepping on it if desired or seizing control of the process to alter audio behaviour. As noted, not all apps offer or are coded for this support.

There are options in VLC and some WinAmp clones to "pipe" the audio output elsewhere, so you could kludge together a method of running one app 'live' and another to a file or virtual device (which was streaming in another app as if 'live'). Wiretap might also help in the initial grabs.

If you then wanted one on each hemisphere, you might premix them as mono and drive one to L and one to R... but I don't think the Mac prefs allow for more than one twist of the balance knob, so you'd then probably have to remix them as stereo, unless you want a 2nd stereo playing audio in the room. All of this might be very processor intensive, especially if you wanted it uncompressed and near realtime. If delay wasn't an issue (ie: it was for later listening or podcast, or whatever), and quality wasn't an issue, you could probably script it, but why?

As for the old PC issue, it was long a justifiable reason to use a Mac (or an Amiga) for multimedia production purely because the PC could only handle a single audio channel, while the Mac (or Amiga) could always handle multiple channels (ie: background audio and sound effect for button at one time). You'd still have to mix down for PC authoring, but at least the build and testing were done on true multichannel production machines.

PCs only caught up technologically with the later generations of SB16+ cards and MS writing better audio code by Win98. Slackers.