Playback of Reaper and other applications simultaeously

Question

I am using Reaper on an HP laptop running Windows 7. The soundcard is integrated with the motherboard and I am using Asio4All to avoid latency issues.

On my old PC running Windows XP, I would often play jam tracks from my browser (Google Chrome), while jamming to the track with my guitar using effects through Reaper, all through my headphones.

On my current PC (described in first paragraph), I am experiencing an issue where if I try to do the same, audio from Reaper is played through the headphones, but the sound from my browser gets "bumped" to my laptop's speakers.

Can anyone shed some light as to why this is happening and how it would be possible to rectify the situation?

Answer 1

I have two playback devices in my notebook, one's called something like "Speakers and Headphones", the other one's called "Communication-Headphones". I'd try to completely disable the second one, worked nicely for me and could maybe work for you. Another possibility is to get a decent audio interface ;)

Answer 2

Advanced software in Windows 7 is able to specify the playback device to use and thus will get routed based on a choice. Any software that is not able to choose a device on it's own will automatically be routed to the default audio device according to the options under Sounds in Control Panel.

If you update the default sound device to be the headphones and then restart the browser, it should play how you want.