That’s actually not the case. It hasn’t been for quite a while, and the technology has been heading in the other direction for a very long time.
You could accurately call this the essence or raison d’etre, of DirectX as a prime example.
The application does not play to a device. We just don’t do things on that level anymore. The application hands off to a software interface, whether Windows Waveout, DirectX or what have you, on the level of the operating system.
Believe me, it didn’t used to be that way, and in the days before Windows, games had to directly support a variety of sound cards, and you had to pick the correct one when you installed it. There was a lot of emphasis placed on sound cards being “SoundBlaster-compatible” precisely because of this. These days SoundBlaster is pretty much “who dat?”, but they were the big shots back then. If THAT new game didn’t support YOUR particular brand of sound card, too bad: no sound.
Abstracting all this to a common software interface was the primary driving force behind the creation of DirectX, so that with Windows developers didn’t have to develop support for 'leventy different sound card architectures. You just output to, and they all took their input from, a common toolkit.
MPCStar currently doesn’t even support asking, it simply takes the default OS-assigned interface. Something like VLC (which was always intended to be experimental) does let you select a different interface (at least in Advanced mode), but only on the OS level – waveout as opposed to DirectX for example. But assigning diffferent outputs to those two is well beyond the proper, or even reasonably permissible scope of the application. VLC won’t even let you assign the interfaces per-instance. The setting for one is the setting for all.
MPCStar is not a WinAmp analogue. For that you’ll want to look at the separate CometPlayer included with the install.
The original developer? That, I/we don’t know. I’m not certain who the original developer of TigerPlayer actually is, or what his precise relationship to MPCStar is. He didn’t open-source the player but made it free to distribute and incorporate into other packages, so there may be no relationship beyond the informal. The MPCStar developers as such, or their successors are Chinese, but have never individually monitored this forum at all.
Is developing all this capability possible? I’m not prepared to speak for the developers, but given that TigerPlayer isn’t open-source it isn’t a simple issue. Is development of it likely? Well, no, probably not without considerably more people wanting it.
like a tweeter.
just for the boom anyway 