12

I currently use 3 monitors to efficiëntly use multiple windows and applications at the same time. This works very well for me in general, but I have a problem.

Sometimes a specific window, application or other sound source start producing sound and I want to shift my attention to it (e.g. to mute it or because it requires user interaction). Sometimes the source is difficult to find (especially when the sounds are generic). This brings me to a question:

Is there a way/driver/application to modify the mixer so that the sound source location gets taken into consideration and the sound will shift to the left/right according to the position of the source on the screen or monitor?

In layman's terms: I want music playing from a player on the right monitor sound louder from the right speaker then from the left speaker. Is this possible?

I personally use Windows 7 and Ubuntu 11.04, but this might be interesting for others with other OS'ses so solutions for those are also welcome.

Breakthrough
  • 34,847
dtech
  • 818

3 Answers3

3

This doesnt answer your question directly, however here is a possible alternative:

Go to Windows 7 Ease of Access center and select "Use text of visual alternatives for sounds"

Check "Turn on visual notifications for sounds"

Depending on your preference, select "Flash active window" or "Flash active action bar"

As for adjusting the sound per what desktop its in, I dont believe there is any application out there that does it. I have never heard of anyone wanting something like that. However, I believe it should be possible to do, if there was a programmer willing to do it.

Keltari
  • 75,447
2

A programming question was asked on StackOverflow regarding this.

It looks as though there are not yet software utilities that do this. However, I think it would be a popular tool.

It could be written for Windows using DirectX, which allows for management of both audio and visual systems.

An important feature would have to be being able to set certain application windows to be exempt from the positional audio so that audio players and video players would not be piped out of the closest speaker only.

Community
  • 1
music2myear
  • 49,799
1

I know this is ancient, but I made a very limited & simple tool that I am using for just that:

https://github.com/nexxyz/WinPan

nexxyz
  • 11