Virtual Audio Streaming

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on January 13, 2013

ShiningMorning's Virtual Audio Streaming software creates a virtual sound card in your Windows system. It acts as a wrapper on your existing sound card, enhancing its capabilities and making it easy to record and stream whatever audio your system is playing, no matter what the source: microphone, media player, or external device. It also improves sound recording in Windows, even automatically fixing the "no Stereo Mix" problem in Windows 7 and Vista. It's free to try for 30 days, but the trial version places an audio "watermark" on the output.

Virtual Audio Streaming's main window isn't the program's main interface; the System Tray icon's menu accesses all the features most users need most of the time. It's just as well since the main window isn't particularly intuitive or attractive; for example, you have to scroll the Recording box up or down a few millimeters to view it all, even though the interface itself resizes by dragging. Nevertheless, it explained how to set Virtual Audio Streaming as our default device for playback and recording on the Windows Sound properties dialog. We're well familiar with this, yet we couldn't get Virtual Audio Streaming to play audio over our system's speakers, headphones, or any audio output. Our system sound played normally when we tested it in the Sound properties, yet we couldn't get Virtual Audio Streaming to play audio through it. It's easy enough to switch between playback and recording devices from the program's tray menu, but the inability to hear what you're recording is a major setback. Clicking Help took us to the program's Web site and some FAQs, none of which addressed the issue. All our drivers and settings were up to date, leaving us at a loss to explain the silence.

The trial version's annoying "watermark" consists of a digitally distorted female voice interspersed with bursts of intense noise. And the fact is, Virtual Audio Streaming doesn't do anything you can't do with freeware, such as Webcast system audio instead of just your microphone input, or fixing the "no Stereo Mix" issue. Many tools offer superior recording capabilities, too. Keep listening!

Editors' note: This is a review of the trial version of Virtual Audio Streaming 4.0.

Publisher's Description

From ShiningMorning:

Virtual Audio Streaming adds a virtual sound card on your system and becomes an enhancement/wrapper of your real sound card. Virtual Audio Streaming lets you Broadcast/Record/Connect all kinds of sounds, no matter whether the sound is from the local audio file, microphone, sound application, online music or online chatting/meeting voice. For example, you can use Virtual Audio Streaming to record Skype meetings, with peoples and your voice mixed together or separated, and then broadcast the conversations to msn messenger or ustream.tv. Please be noted that the software is just like a virtual audio cable and all the sounds are transferred with its internal loopback tunnel, so there is NO any audio quality loss. Virtual Audio Streaming also fixes the 'No Stereo Mix' sound card issue of Vista/Win7. Also, you can use Virtual Audio Streaming together with our virtual webcam software(Magic Camera) to stream both videos & audios. If you are finding a XP/Vista/Windows 7 audio changing tool, Virtual Audio Streaming is also suitable for you. It adds itself in windows system tray and let you select system default playback devices with one click on its popup menu.

What's new in this version: Version 4.0: 1) Now supports full audio formats, from 40KHz to 192KHz, 8bits to 24bits; 2) Fixes a major bug in sound recording, which sometimes caused the wav header unreadable for some audio players; 3) Creates recording files with a time unique name. 4) Improves driver performance; 5) Fixes a driver installation issue. 6) Optimizes GUI. 7) This version also internally integrated a MP3 sound recorder to reduce the recorded filesize.