Page Type: REFERENCE
In some situations where physical space is limited and the amount of content to monitor is unusually large, such as newsroom assignment desks, it may be useful to have more than one Rangecast player running on a single PC, routing audio to different speakers.
In some situations, such as space-limited news assignment desks, customers may want to listen to multiple Rangecast players at the same time.
Some people who monitor scanner audio professionally are familiar with attempting to listen to multiple scanners at the same time. Scanners only play transmissions live as they are broadcast, so information will be forever missed if not heard immediately at the moment it is aired.
Since Rangecast buffers transmissions that are broadcast at the same time, and plays the audio sequentially, one of the advantages of the Rangecast player for professional users is that it usually eliminates the difficult task of trying to listen to and understand multiple audio sources that are playing at the same time.
For applications where the total amount of audio being monitored exceeds 100% (60 seconds of audio every minute), Rangecast offers the option of playing transmissions at a speeded-up rate. So with Rangecast, it is even possible to listen to 100+ seconds of audio every 60 seconds, without needing to monitor multiple audio sources at the same time.
However, for some very high-load applications, such as news room assignment desks, it may still be useful to listen to more than one Rangecast audio player at the same time.
If the Rangecast players are running on different PCs, then the audio from each player is routed to a different speaker. However, when the environment is very space limited, it is sometimes desirable to actually run all the Rangecast players on a single PC.
In this specific circumstance -- needing to monitor more than about 100 seconds of audio every 60 seconds from a single PC, while routing the audio from each player to different speakers -- the following information may be useful.
Rangecast plays audio through the web browser, and due to technical limitations the monaural audio from the broadcast source is played in monaural format on a single set of speakers (no pan option between left/right speakers, or option for selecting a specific set of speakers.)
While neither Rangecast's player, nor the web browser itself, can route the audio to different speakers, customers have told us that they have successfully used a new feature in Windows 10, or third-party software, to route audio from multiple Rangecast players to different speakers. (Rangecast itself has not tested these methods and cannot guarantee their performance.)
Requirements:
(a) Each Rangecast player on the PC must be run in a different supported browser (we recommend Chrome, Firefox, or Opera)
(b) You will need a different speakers for each player (not merely left/right pairs, but actually different sets of speakers)
(c) In most cases, to connect multiple speakers to the PC, you will need external USB sound card adapters for the additional speakers (to create the additional audio outputs used by these speakers), and and sufficient USB ports on the PC for connecting these USB sound cards to your PC. The sound card adapters are very inexpensive and can be found by Googling USB external sound adapters.
The known methods:
Option 1) In Windows 10, under "Windows Settings > System > Sound > App volume and device preferences", on a table row for each application, there is an option for choosing a specific speaker (which may be different from the system default). For more information:
https://superuser.com/questions/258969/routing-applications-sound-to-different-sound-device-windows
Option 2) Third party softwarte Chevolume.com (retailing for $20)
Option 3) Third party software AudioRouter (a free application available through download sites)
Note that, for the methods using third-party software, we believe the user must have admin rights on the PC. This is likely not an issue when using the Windows 10 native feature for routing application audio to a specific speaker.
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