Lond long ago a friend told me about this sim so I had a go playing the demo. ( Maybe 0.5U ? Don't remember clearly. At that time XRT is in demo. ) In that version when you alt + tab to another window the audio is still on, no matter it's full screen mode or windowed. But in today's LFS, when the game is in inactive state sound will be cut off. Can a "output audio when inactive" option be added to the program ? Would be useful if you watch a race and talk to someone via instant messaging at the same time.

LFS used to use WaveOut for audio, which isn't supported in Vista (and presumably not in Win7 either), so switched to using DirectSound which is supported. DirectSound will only process sounds from the active window, so I don't think there is much the devs can do about it.

Edit: Found the source: http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?p=455914#post455914

WoW has an option to output sound even when the window isn't in focus, it works on Vista too

MSDN says:

Quote :

DSBCAPS_GLOBALFOCUS - The buffer is a global sound buffer. With this flag set, an application using DirectSound can continue to play its buffers if the user switches focus to another application, even if the new application uses DirectSound. The one exception is if you switch focus to a DirectSound application that uses the DSSCL_WRITEPRIMARY flag for its cooperative level. In this case, the global sounds from other applications will not be audible.

I don't know if this will be helpul or not with this issue, but i used this guide to set up audacity on win7, so it is sound related.

Quote from someone from the internet :

Click the windows orb (start button) go to control panel and type "sound" in the search box in the top right corner, then click sound. Go to the playback tab, right click on any device and click "show disabled devices." Right click on the device you want to use and click "set as default communication device." If you have trouble, try temporarily disabling the microphone.

This maybe totally unhelpful but i thought i would post it, just in case.

It's not related and what's more, it's suboptimal. What this person describes is how to set a device as default communication device, normally a microphone. However, you might not want that device to be the default (means global) nor is it a communication device (= VOIP input) if what you do is record via Audacity.
The distinction between communication devices and normal recording and playback devices is made because the Windows 7 Mixer can reduce non-communication devices's volume if a communication device is active.

The better approach is via Audacity itself; Edit -> Preferences -> Audio I/O

Tht was the whole problem though morpha, the device was listed in the audacity preferances just fine, but i could not pick up any audio until i did what that guide described.

That's weird, works fine for me, Audacity records from whatever device it is set to while my default recording device and, incidentally also default communication device is set to my microphone