Seperate audio outputs for fedora- is this limited by my soundcard or the number of outputs on my motherboard?

[stan]

On Sun, 3 Oct 2010 01:11:01 +0800
Samuel Kidman <samkidman at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> I want to be able to play one audio source through my headphones (say
> from one application) and then play another audio source through my
> line out port (from another application). Is this possible?

Short answer, no.

I think there are some very high end audio cards that have more than
one processing pipeline, but I have never owned one.  With a standard
card, this is not possible because the "engine" can only process one
stream at a time.  The analog output has to go to the output device
continuously, so it can't do more than one at a time because there is
no time. :-)  In other words, to have two sound streams running
simultaneously to different outputs, you have to have two sound
devices.  Jack and pulseaudio solve a different problem; mixing
multiple inputs before sending them to the "engine", and routing the
output to multiple places.

Just buy a cheap USB soundcard (get one that adheres to the standard,
or if it doesn't, has been reverse engineered to work in alsa), and you
can do what you want.  Desktop users can use USB, but also can use a
cheap PCI card also.