I’m trying to find a simple, single-cable method for allowing my new iPod to play through my computer speakers at work while still keeping the speaker hooked up to my computer. Coincidentally enough, I was asked to do this very task for one of my bosses last week. I figured it was easy enough because I just needed to buy a y-splitter.
Well, when I got to Radio Shack and found the y-splitters, I realized that the commonly found splitters don’t work that way. They are instead designed to take the audio output from a single device (such as an MP3 player) and split it to two devices (such as friends sharing music over two pairs of headphones). But what I needed was output from two devices (computer + iPod) into one device (speakers). I searched around, but I couldn’t find anything like that. What I ended up having to buy for my boss was a female/female stereo connector, a male/female stereo splitter/adapter, and two stereo mini-jack cables. So the cable from the speakers went in one end of the stereo connector and the splitter/adapter went into the other end. Then each of the stereo mini-jack cables went into the splitter/adapter, with the other end being plugged into his iPod and his computer’s sound card, respectively.
I’m thinking there’s got to be a simpler way to do this for myself. I’m thinking that all I should need is two stereo mini-jack cables and a y-splitter that is female all around. Does such a splitter exist? I haven’t had any luck searching on the internet so far.
Use the splitter and a male-to-male phono cord. Plug the iPod into the male splitter connection, the speakers into one of the female splitter jacks, and use the male-to-male cord to connect the jack on the computer to the remaining jack on the splitter.
The iPod may not like having its output driven by the input from the computer, though. The simplest way to avoid that would be unplugging the iPod when not being used.
You need a mixer to combine the outputs. You can get powered speakers that have multiple mixed inputs.
Or use a male to male lead, feed your ipod into the line-in (or mic) input on your PC, then use the Volume Control to enable the input and set your mix level.
The microphone input on your sound card is the WRONG input for anything but a microphone. The impedance is different, the level is different, the EQ is different. While the device in Windows is called a “mixer”, there is only one line input on the sound card. It mixes the level of this with all other sound sources in Windows.
Really, what you need here is not a splitter, but a mixer. Try Radio Shack. They still make a very small one.
Is there any particular reason you don’t want to just play the iPod through your computer? I mean, I may be stating the obvious, but that is the easiest thing to do, much easier than buying a mixer. If you connect the iPod to your computer with its sync cable, you can access it and play songs from it through iTunes. I don’t know your level of knowledge about how iPods work, so forgive me if that sounds patronizing. I mean, there was a question on this board asking if it was possible to use anything other than songs bought through the iTunes store on an iPod; he didn’t know you could convert songs from your CDs. Nothing wrong with not knowing something, but sometimes you look for a complicated solution to a simple problem when you don’t know enough about how the things work.
The reason you might not want to use the computer as the relay is if you want the sound from the iPod to play independent of the computer being on. In that case, like other people said, you want a mixer. That will give you control of how much sound from each source goes through the speakers and will keep you from blowing out either component with inappropriate input/output wiring. There’s a decent amount of electricity involved even in something as innocuous as sound wiring and it’s entirely possible to ruin one or all of the components if you manage somehow to connect A to B in a way that they’re not normally designed to do.
In this case, I would also suggest buying a dock so that your iPod doesn’t drain its battery constantly while playing. You get the added benefit of remote control and better sound output from the iPod than the standard mini-plug with most docks too. And when you want to grab the iPod and take it with you, you don’t have to disconnect anything from it.
To all of you, thank you for the responses. I had no idea that what I was looking to do involved the amount of risk it does.
As to why I’d want to have both hooked up at the same time, I always enjoy having background music (or foreground, sometimes) playing while I work. However, it’s not uncommon for me to have to review audio recordings on my computer as a function of my job. So rather than having to switch cables around, I was hoping to just have them hooked up at the same time. I’ll take a look and see if buying a mixer is worth the money. Unfortunately, my machine’s sound card does not have a line-in jack.
Sleel, to answer your question about playing the iPod through the computer, I should have stated that my home computer is the one I use for synching. I am admittedly new to using the iPod, but my understanding from other friends is that I can’t just go hooking it up to any other computer with iTunes. Am I mistaken in this?
You actually can play music from the iPod without syncing. I’ve done it, and visiting friends have played their iPods through my computer. They did figure that people would want to do that, so it’s not that much of a problem.
If you have it set up to automatically sync, it should ask for confirmation whenever you open iTunes on a different computer from the one you normally sync to. iTunes will want to erase the pod and sync to that library by default, but you can tell iTunes that you don’t want to sync the iPod to this computer. I think there’s a check box that will keep that dialog from popping up again, and then the default behavior will be not to sync whenever connected to that computer. You can then access the songs and play them through iTunes just as you would on your main computer.
There’s also a key combination you can use to override the default behavior. On Macs, it’s command+option. On Windows I would guess that it’s ctrl+alt, but I don’t know for sure. You should be able to look it up in the help menu for iTunes, either under “shortcut keys” or “iPod sync” help topics.
Thank you for that. My coworker and I both have iPods and are looking forward to trying this. Hopefully, I’ll remember to bring in my synch cable to work tomorrow.